Cloud Migration Is Back (If You Ignore the Actual Numbers)

An anonymous reader shares a report: The cloud migration narrative that powered tech valuations during the pandemic is attempting a comeback, but the underlying data suggests a more complex story.

UBS's new survey of IT services reveals a striking disconnect between industry expectations and customer reality. While executives proclaim "2025 will be far better than what we've seen in 2024," their enterprise clients report having migrated merely 15% of workloads to the cloud, with the remainder presenting increasingly complex challenges.

The numbers are particularly telling: Growth rates for major cloud providers AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud have declined from pandemic peaks of 40-50% to 10-20%. IT budgets for 2024, meanwhile, are projected to be "flattish to up very slightly, maybe a couple percent," marking a significant departure from the explosive growth of recent years.

I know why

[CEC-P]

If you are using one garbage cloud provider with constant issues and outages and you sign up for another cloud provider to migrate to them instead, it looks like a new customer.

Good. I make good money migrating them BACK

[MIPSPro]

Trendy management migrates to the cloud because it's got a hype factor. Then when they realize they are hemorrhaging money and they want to go back to self-hosting in the computer room or data center down the street, they have to pay the piper again. I'm the piper.

I've actually seen the reverse already

[HBI]

de-migration. I knew this was going to happen. Someone in the government gets a recurring cloud bill and doesn't want to pay the cost anymore. They come up with estimates of the cost to go back to on-prem and do so.

My view is that it's hard to come up with a case where the cloud saves much money for anyone. Even if you got rid of some of your IT support, you'd be stuck getting more cloud developers to do the same things you had your hardware guys doing on-prem - troubleshooting and monitoring.

The government likes the idea of cloud because they hated all those independent data centers and wanted them all concentrated under some central bureaucrat's control. But that isn't enough to make it happen in a world where line-item funding of programs happens. If you don't control the $$$, you don't control where and what the computers are.

Re: I've actually seen the reverse already

[PPH]

The government likes the idea of cloud because they hated all those independent data centers and wanted them all concentrated under some central bureaucrat's control.

If that was their thinking, then it backfired. Bigly. I've seen a few "encloudified" operations. And their owners had effectively lost track [xkcd.com] of where their stuff was being hosted.

Re:

[Voyager529]

My view is that it's hard to come up with a case where the cloud saves much money for anyone.

There are four areas where cloud hosting saves money, in my experience:

1. E-mail hosting. I've got one or two clients with ten-or-fewer employees who still on-prem, and with no real compliance requirements, something like Axigen or Mailcow are serviceable, but if you're of ANY size and scale, letting Google or Microsoft host your e-mail is a much better idea than keeping on-prem Exchange alive.

2. SaaS, for finger-pointing reasons. If you have an on-prem EMR software, it's either ridiculously customized for

Re: I've actually seen the reverse already

[Bodrius]

There are a ton of variations for #3 - its the same problem as #1, actually. If you need scale but the problem is completely outside your core business, it makes more sense to pay for the cloud service than maintain your own. In both cases though you are completely outsourcing the problem, so comparing the relative costs of on-prem vs cloud infra is effectively someone else's problem.

For most purposes the argument for cloud vs on-prem is an IaaS discussion - and ultimately the main argument is elasticity.

Th

Cloud saves money same way eating out does

[Somervillain]

Going to cloud to save money is like eating out instead of cooking to save money. Under some circumstances, it makes lowers cost, but more often than not, it doesn't.

So EVERYONE moved to the cloud, typically a hyperscaler. We're moving back a lot of infrastructure off of it because:

1. The costs went up
2. The costs are projected to go up even more.


For some, absolutely, cloud is the way to go. If you're a startup, it makes sense. If you have dynamic needs, it makes sense. If you're a 5 pers

Our company plans on going back

[nikkipolya]

The company I work for, moved all of our workstations to VMware cloud. They have now realized that it costs much more, have signed up for a single point of failure, poor GPU performance for those who need it... The dream of shared hardware resources saving money is not really working as promised. They are now planning a move back to under the desk computers. I guess for the current state of HW technology, cloud has touched it's economic ceiling.

You must have gotten a good deal

[Somervillain]

The company I work for, moved all of our workstations to VMware cloud. They have now realized that it costs much more, have signed up for a single point of failure, poor GPU performance for those who need it... The dream of shared hardware resources saving money is not really working as promised. They are now planning a move back to under the desk computers. I guess for the current state of HW technology, cloud has touched it's economic ceiling.

Last I checked, the VMWare license cost as much, if not more, than good hardware. Hard to justify all that, especially if you've ever used VMWare remotely and saw how glitchy it is.

The cloud is a trap

[MpVpRb]

Run away

If you ignore the numbers, yeah

[taustin]

"Growth rates for major cloud providers AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud have declined from pandemic peaks of 40-50% to 10-20%"

That's not a reversal, that's a saturated market. Until that number is negative, it's not a reversal.

(I do expect it will go negative within the next few years, since could it, in fact, more expensive and less reliable. The only companies who will continue going to the cloud are those who have a mission critical app they can't operate without from a vendor who only offers continued upgrade and security patches on a cloud migration - at several times the cost. Why, yes, I do know such a company, why do you ask?)

Re:

[Bumbul]

Also worth noting that those are growth percentages for the revenue. Today's 20% growth is probably the same growth in absolute values (i.e. dollars) as 50% growth was a few years back.

Re:

[SouthSeb]

Exactly! Also, the world we're living in, where a 10-20% yearly growth is reason for worries because it's not again the same 50% of a completely outlier period.

And sinking?

[whitroth]

I expect a lot more loss from cloud. And speaking as a computer professional (including a B.Sc) and a long career on mainframes, PCs, and servers, let me repeat what I've been saying for years: there's no difference between "the cloud" and timesharing on a mainframe. And management is finally realizing this, and wants more control over what's on their systems.

It keeps coming back and forth

[xack]

Ever since the mainframe era. With upcoming next generation fiber links making 100 gigabit speeds possible more companies will be tempted by cloud again, but the speed of light will always put diminishing returns on the most latency sensitive applications.

On your marks, get set, blow.

[Pseudonymous Powers]

If we've learned one thing from online services, it's that, when growth stalls, the service providers start to look for ways to make up the "lost" revenue. Which leads inevitably to enshittification. Get ready.

Before you migrate to the Cloud.. Get Tor and ...

[jerryjnormandin]

The Cloud is not a save place to host your business. Do yourself a favor. I know the Dark Web is a nasty place but if you value security and want to know what the script kiddies have at their disposal you should install TOR and download the latest Onion Directory from GitHub. Do your own research. Once you are done you will want to shore up your company's private date center using the old school multi firewall and layer 3 switch approach.