The “gotchas” to know before exiting cloud
Leaving the cloud is hard to do well unless you’ve done it before. At Deft, we do it daily. Here’s what we’ve learned.
If your cloud plans failed due to poor management, your colocation plans could, too.
We see it all the time: companies migrate to the cloud, complain about cost, and return on-prem. But here’s the truth: the cloud isn’t always the culprit. Sometimes, a flawed migration is to blame — like doing a lift-and-shift because iT’s fASteR without embracing cloud-native principles. It’d be similar to moving to a foreign country without knowing the language or customs and being surprised when the locals overcharge you. Of course you’ll pay more!
On-prem habits don’t work in a cloud world. But where your data lives is secondary to who’s managing it. Your biggest concern should be your team’s expertise, whether it’s applied on-prem or in the cloud.
Everyone likes to talk about security in the cloud. But 99% of security failures in the cloud are your fault, not the cloud’s (Gartner).
The same goes for on-prem. When you move to a data center from the cloud, it’s not more secure just because you own the hardware. Everything has to be set up and maintained by people who know what they’re doing. Make sure you have security-minded people involved, from picking the facility to implementing the servers.
You already know that you can’t get AWS on the phone no matter how many zeroes you have in your cloud bill.
But depending on where you put your servers, some data center providers aren’t much better. Ever tried to get support from a company like Equinix? You can’t. Not easily, anyway. If you want a team of folks who will pick up the phone (without 6 phone escalations first), opt for a boutique provider with large-scale experience instead.
Plan on rebuilding your backup strategy for colocation.
Cloud providers handle a lot under the hood, but in colocation, you’re the captain of the ship. You’ll need to redesign and test your backup strategy for an on-prem environment.
Migrating out of the cloud can be just as complex of a process as entering it.
Unwinding your infrastructure from the cloud requires careful planning and execution. Security configurations need to be rebuilt in-house, data needs to be repatriated, and applications might require re-architecting to function outside the cloud’s embrace. It’s a strategic migration in its own right, demanding close attention to ensure a smooth transition back to the data center. And if the only thing stopping you from moving on-prem is feeling overwhelmed by the migration itself, consider a managed data center migration.
