Maximizing Business Performance: Overcoming Cloud Repatriation Challenges and Optimising IT Modernisation

Hyperscalers account for more than £4 in every £5 spent on public cloud services in the UK between them. They’re also growing at a faster rate than smaller cloud providers who are a facing dwindling collective share of this fast-growing market. It’s no surprise, therefore, that vendors are increasingly focusing their efforts on public cloud technologies from these three big players. From NPD and solution development to leasing and consumption models, everything is becoming more and more geared towards public cloud.

Many MSPs aren’t in a position to do anything other than offer clients public cloud solutions – meaning cloud selection is frequently limited on alternatives for businesses, and innovation in cloud services is increasingly hampered. Whether this lack of competition is good for IT leaders as they continue to wrestle with digital transformation programmes is debatable and the subject of an ongoing Ofcom investigation.

Yet, despite this monopoly, cloud repatriation has begun to snowball as companies evolve their cloud strategies, having experienced both the benefits and shortcomings of public cloud adoption. For IT teams seeking to modernize and right-size their IT infrastructure to better align with evolving business needs and budgets, retrieving applications or workloads from public clouds and moving them elsewhere is increasingly being recognized as a valuable strategy.

Unlocking business benefits

As rising energy costs and economic volatility bring budgets under pressure, organisations are looking for new ‘save-to-invest’ strategies, releasing cash for projects linked to growth. Reducing day to day IT costs is the major driver of cloud repatriation decisions. If CIOs can drive down operational costs, this opens the doors to project spend on innovation and moving the business forward.

Greater cloud consumption equates to higher operating costs and there’s wider understanding now of ‘hidden’ costs associated with public cloud adoption, such as significant data egress charges. While it’s quick and easy to purchase public cloud storage, many have found the attractive entry prices are a fraction of what they end up paying. Public cloud giants Microsoft, Amazon and Google have been blasted by Gartner for their aggressive pricing to lure in customers. So, it’s no wonder that 96% of IT leaders who moved workloads or applications away from public cloud providers cited cost efficiency as the main benefit.

Compliance requirements, security and data locality concerns are also prompting many businesses to repatriate workloads. 95% of organisations said their security posture had improved as a result of moving away from public cloud. In addition, there’s a growing number of firms choosing to migrate

specific apps from hyperscale providers to another location, which enables them to achieve better execution and performance. 85% organisations noted better management control and business agility as a result.

De-risking IT modernisation

But migrating apps and modernising legacy IT systems is by no means a straightforward task. Many firms find themselves exposed to old software that’s ever harder to scale, integrate, maintain and secure. Specialist apps may have been developed using ancient code by people no longer with the company, and each app may be separately licenced and hosted from multiple servers and virtual machines. IT teams have struggled with software modernisation due to lack of internal skills and resources, complex integration and testing and prohibitive costs.

Although innovation is hampered by the continued dominance of public cloud offerings from the hyperscalers, specialist providers are now developing new solutions to help companies futureproof their IT and facilitate digital transformation. To help firms overcome challenges faced with modernising IT systems, Creative’s Modern Application Platform (MAP) is designed to de-risk legacy system updates while stretching budgets using advanced Kubernetes and containerisation technologies.

MAP provides organisations with a single-stop solution for updating older software to the very latest languages and frameworks, while carefully arranging and simplifying often scary and costly cloud transitions. Companies also benefit from a simple consumption model, reducing costs and modernisation lead times and releasing internal IT resources for impactful strategic innovation projects.

Accelerating innovation

To achieve their business goals sooner, organisations are increasingly turning to partners with expertise around the re-siting of applications and workloads from public cloud environments. With skilled teams offering fully managed services, specialist providers make it easier and more cost-effective for firms to switch to new cloud solutions and adapt to fast-changing market conditions to leverage competitive advantage. MSPs are better placed to advise on key repatriation considerations such as whether to deploy a private, hybrid or multi-cloud setup, or leverage an external co-location facility. They can also help in-house IT teams address data governance and security policies, which inevitably differ across industry sectors and geographies.

As digital transformation gathers pace across all industry sectors, there’s mounting pressure to make IT simpler to manage and less costly to own and operate. Infrastructure-as-a-Service models for elements like storage, networking and compute, are increasingly being applied to stretch IT budgets and resources to accelerate innovation. Savings on infrastructure, data centre space, licensing, support and headcount also offer a welcome balance sheet boost.

In the transition towards Everything as a Service (XaaS) IT models to boost business agility and efficiency, firms must tread a careful path to ensure solutions not only align with future needs but also dovetail seamlessly with existing IT systems. Digital transformation journeys are growing ever-more complex and difficult to navigate. Hot on the heels of infrastructure virtualisation, application virtualisation is now snowballing. Yet compute and storage – and therefore virtualisation – are coming ever closer to the edge. This increases the need for greater workload mobility, automated operations, and improved performance and availability of resources.

Firms are increasingly recognizing the value of MSPs with a successful track record in their sector, who are focused on developing solutions to help them to overcome the unique set of industry and technology obstacles. Purpose-built technologies and fully managed services from this new breed of sector IT specialists will be invaluable in accelerating innovation to help businesses stay ahead of the curve.