For years, cloud computing was the tech world’s buzzword. As recently as 2020, it was hailed as the silver bullet, allowing people to work from anywhere, enabling businesses to scale their operations instantly, and delivering digital services at speed and with agility. Enterprises rushed to migrate workloads to the cloud, inspired by its promises of flexibility, cost-efficiency, and future-readiness. All this has only gained momentum with the ongoing AI boom.
The UAE and Saudi Arabia have become focal points for hyperscaler investment. Microsoft, Oracle, AWS, and Google Cloud have all launched, or announced, major data centre expansions in the region. It would be easy to assume that a wholesale shift to the cloud is inevitable. But that’s only part of the story.
Counter Cloud Culture
While enthusiasm for the cloud remains high, we’re now seeing a more grounded, discerning approach. It’s a bit like buying a flashy sports car. It’s exhilarating at first, but over time, you start to notice the ongoing fuel bills, the pricey maintenance, and the fact that it’s overkill for the school run. We’re seeing this cloud caution especially in government, banking, healthcare, and other sectors where data sensitivity and compliance are non-negotiable. These organisations are revisiting earlier decisions and reassessing whether all workloads belong in the cloud.
But compliance doesn’t appear to be the main driver. Licensing fees from major software vendors have crept up, and so too have monthly cloud bills. As workloads scale, especially those tied to high-performance computing and AI training, cloud expenses are spiralling. Gartner predicts that this year, more than 50% of enterprises that have moved workloads to the public cloud will seek to repatriate some of them due to unexpected cost overruns, performance issues, or a combination of both.
And it’s already happening. Across the globe, and increasingly in the Middle East, organisations are bringing workloads back from the public cloud to on-premises infrastructure or colocation facilities. Not because cloud has failed, but because reality has kicked in.
Why Cloud Costs Spiral
The cloud’s flexible, pay-as-you-go model is a double-edged sword. It allows businesses to avoid hefty upfront capital expenditures, which is a huge advantage when launching quickly or scaling rapidly. But variable pricing can also make cloud bills highly unpredictable. Add to that the rapid pace of digitalisation across the Middle East, often spurred by government-led cloud-first strategies, and many organisations have ended up with sprawling cloud footprints and ballooning costs.
In the AI era, the problem becomes even more acute. Training LLMs or running intensive inferencing workloads, consumes massive compute power, which translates into significant cloud spend.
That’s why many are turning to repatriation. It’s not a rejection of the cloud, but rather a recalibration.
The Repatriation Reality Check
Of course, moving workloads back from the cloud isn’t as simple as flipping a switch. Repatriation usually ushers in a hybrid IT setup: some workloads stay in the public cloud, others move to private environments or edge facilities. This fragmentation introduces complexity, and with it, new management challenges.
Think of your IT environment like a city. When everything’s centralised, it’s easier to maintain roads, manage utilities, and respond to emergencies. But once outposts like suburbs, industrial zones and scattered neighbourhoods start to spring up, you need a new way to monitor and manage everything. That’s where observability comes in.
Observability is the equivalent of a smart city dashboard. It gives you real-time, comprehensive visibility into traffic flows, energy usage, emergency response times, and more. In IT terms, it helps you monitor performance across infrastructure, applications, and networks, making it easier to detect anomalies, pinpoint root causes, and optimise operations.
In the context of cloud repatriation, observability plays a critical role. It allows teams to validate that workloads are performing better and costing less on-premises, ensures that latency-sensitive applications are meeting user expectations, and provides the insights necessary to optimise performance across the hybrid estate. Without it, IT teams are effectively flying blind.
Planning for What Comes After
The decision to repatriate should not be made lightly. It requires careful consideration of both the technical and business implications. However, perhaps the bigger challenge lies not in the migration itself but in what comes after. Once workloads are repatriated, businesses must have the tools, talent, and processes in place to operate in a hybrid environment. That means investing in observability, ensuring data governance practices extend across all environments, and upskilling teams to handle the increased complexity.
Cloud Maturity Means Choice
This wave of repatriation doesn’t mark the end of cloud computing. If anything, it shows that organisations are getting smarter. They’re no longer buying into blanket cloud-first narratives. Instead, they’re evaluating what works best for each workload, and that’s a sign of cloud maturity.
Public cloud still offers immense value, particularly for unpredictable workloads, or those that benefit from rapid scalability. But the pendulum is swinging back toward a more balanced model where businesses choose the right mix of cloud, on-prem, and edge, based on cost, control, and performance.
As organisations embrace this new phase of cloud maturity, they’ll find observability to be the glue that holds everything together. It ensures you’re not just moving workloads, but optimising them. It helps avoid new blind spots as infrastructure spreads out. And it empowers teams to make smarter, faster decisions in an increasingly hybrid world.
Coming back to the bustling city analogy, observability is the emergency response centre, monitoring every district, responding to incidents in real time, and keeping the whole system running safely and smoothly. Whether you’re expanding the cloud suburbs or revitalising on-prem high streets, it is what ensures order amidst the chaos.
By Sascha Giese, Global Tech Evangelist, Observability, SolarWinds
