Cloud Repatriation Isn’t a Return to the Old Days

There’s a fear factor among many organizations about cloud repatriation — moving from public to private cloud.

The public cloud offers unmatched agility and freedom, but the private cloud — so the thinking goes — represents a return to the days when it took weeks to provision new compute, network and storage resources.

That’s simply not the case.

There’s a whole new infrastructure layer, right above the metal and the compute resources, that enables a public cloud-like experience on-premises. Platina Systems has improved the enterprise tech stack dramatically, making cloud repatriation a compelling option for organizations seeking lower costs and greater control over their data.

What Is Cloud Repatriation?

Cloud repatriation is the process of moving applications and data from the public cloud to on-premises infrastructure. Organizations may consider repatriation for a variety of reasons, such as the desire to optimize their architecture or the need to avoid public cloud’s hidden costs.

What Is Data Repatriation?

Data repatriation is the process of taking data stored in the public cloud and moving it to on-premises infrastructure. Although public cloud data storage seems inexpensive at first, providers charge punitive egress fees for accessing and using that data, driving the total cost of ownership (TCO) well above that of a modern on-premises alternative. Repatriation helps organizations avoid this expense and regain control of their data.

On-Premises Challenges

Traditionally, operations teams built on-premises infrastructure very differently than how it’s built today.

Each component operated as a standalone appliance or isolated software stack that operators needed to connect and configure without the use of APIs or automation. Provisioning a simple bare metal server required many manual steps, detailed checklists and laborious, error-prone work. Who wants to do this?

Today, many of these appliances are now best deployed as containers or virtual machines. Minimally, you just need servers and switches, while everything else can be a software element that you simply load onto your private cloud. Configuration is entirely API driven, and the current state of the system is constantly checked against the desired state to ensure correctness.  

Having said that, of course the underlying servers and network will still require human management. Even if you look at some of the major components of cloud native infrastructure today, such as Kubernetes and Ceph, they start their lifecycles on a fully provisioned server. None of them really address the underlying compute infrastructure or the basic configuration of the network. 

Someone is going to have to rack a server, get it up and running on the network and install an operating system. If you’re left to do it yourself, this scenario can feel like a return to the old days in the enterprise data center.

Enter Platina

The notion of the traditional systems administrator is going away. The work of a traditional systems administrator is now the work that Amazon, Google and Microsoft are automating at massive scale in the public cloud. Now we have DevOps engineers and site reliability engineers that are doing higher-level work that delivers more value to businesses.

If you move ahead with cloud repatriation, who is going to do that work for you?

Platina is filling the gap.

Platina and our managed services provider partners can help set up and manage the entire tech stack, including servers, networking and storage, from hardware to software, within a single private portal. Because Platina makes the infrastructure layer so simple, the work that a traditional systems or network administrator would do can now be done by the MSP or your remote hands staff in the data center.

Benefits of Cloud Repatriation

Cloud repatriation has benefits across the organization:

Developers get the agility they need to move fast.

Operations teams get the reliability they need to sleep through the night.

Enterprise IT gets the compatibility it needs to keep using the same cloud native management tools it uses for public cloud workloads.

Security teams get the visibility they need to ensure that company data is safe, secure and compliant with regulations in a known physical environment.

Finance gets a much lower TCO and higher predictability by eliminating hidden and variable costs.

The public cloud has brought tremendous benefits to companies large and small, but more than half of the world’s data isn’t or can’t be stored there. Moving from public to private cloud enables you to unlock the value of all your data — and to avoid vendor lock-in. Public cloud providers make it very easy to get your data into the cloud but very hard to get it out, often to the surprise of their customers.

If you’ve moved from the enterprise data center to the public cloud, does the idea of cloud repatriation feel like taking a step back? It shouldn’t. Request a demo today.