Is Your Data Trapped in the Cloud?

There are signs that many enterprises are feeling buyer’s remorse about their public cloud strategies. Some digital businesses found promises of lower costs, higher performance, and stronger security to be as ephemeral as clouds themselves. A recent Cloud and AI Adoption Survey from IDC revealed that 80% of respondents migrated applications or data from a public cloud back to either a private cloud or on-premises data center in the past year. The same survey noted that these businesses planned to move 50% of their public cloud applications to a private or on-premises environment in the next two years.

The term used to describe moving data from the public cloud to private cloud or on-premises environments is “cloud repatriation”. What is driving businesses toward repatriation? Do these shifts spell trouble for cloud vendors? Let’s take a deeper look at the motivations behind these moves.

What is Prompting Cloud Repatriation?

The IDC survey noted three motivators behind repatriation: security issues, performance concerns and the costs associated with cloud storage and moving data into and out of the cloud.

• Security: Enterprises have found data protection, disaster recovery, data reduction and data archiving difficult to achieve across cloud platforms.
• Performance: Moving data into and out of the cloud has been complicated. Additionally, as data sets grow in the adoption of emerging technologies, performance and latency matters arise. Users need data processing and analysis to be real-time or near-real-time.
• Costs: Storing all of your enterprise data in the cloud can be expensive, especially when you add in the hidden costs of moving data into and out of cloud environments.

Despite these concerns, there are no signs that these factors are affecting the use of cloud services overall. Growth of cloud services is expected to expand from $249.8 billion in 2020 to $331.2 billion by 2022. The business need for cloud platforms to access, compute and store data is not going away. The cloud repatriation push simply means that enterprises seek more control of their data and are being wiser about where and how much they spend on these resources. It’s also a sign they are prioritizing how their critical applications and workloads are being managed to optimize business operations and overall performance.

What to Consider before Cloud Repatriation or Other Data Storage

Before moving to or away from cloud environments, companies must clearly define their enterprise data strategy. That strategy needs to include choosing the best locations to acquire, store, analyze and act on the data. Where does it make the most sense to locate the data—close to users, close to data origination, close to applications or some combination of the three?

To control costs, businesses need to evaluate consumption and commercial models for storage. This involves asking if investments should include capital expenditures that invest in on-premises data centers or if a pay-per-use cloud model would be the best option.

Businesses must also determine the right management model for their data lifecycle. That means defining the best options for data performance, availability, access, protection, reduction and archiving.

How CenturyLink Approaches the Cloud Repatriation Question

CenturyLink Network Storage helps solve security, performance and cost issues associated with cloud environments and provides a path for businesses that need to enact cloud repatriation. It offers a new type of software-defined data storage that extends your cloud to the edge. Your organization can tap storage in the network wherever data is created and consumed, which can then enable near real-time decision making and better consumer experiences.

This solution makes it possible to put shared or dedicated on-demand storage anywhere, all while connected to a high-speed network that reduces latency and improves data access. It offers aggressive price points to help manage costs and flexible performance options to help match user demands to your particular business needs. Network Storage from CenturyLink also offers the ability to manage data from a single portal no matter where the data set is stored. The network itself provides part of the solution by simplifying data replication and data movement as needed.

This enterprise grade storage solution is designed to make it easier to:

• Monetize your data by making it more accessible to AI and machine learning technologies.
• Gain better data visibility and governance by applying consistent storage policies.
• Improve disaster recovery strategies by mitigating for risks of outages, ransomware and other security threats.
• Create optimally located and smaller data centers that can support data-intensive applications.
• Maintain consistent, predictable network performance while still optimizing costs.

Are you facing a cloud repatriation dilemma? Does your enterprise need a more agile data storage solution? Learn if CenturyLink Network Storage is the answer for you.

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