AWS accused of overstating competitive threat posed by cloud repatriation

AWS exaggerating on-premise competition

However, there is a feeling among cloud market stakeholders that AWS is overstating how big a competitive threat on-premise environments pose to its business.

Owen Sayers, an independent security consultant and enterprise architect with over 20 years’ experience in delivering national policing systems, said one only needs to compare the growth in hyperscale datacentre developments to enterprise-sized builds to pick holes in AWS’s claims.

“In the UK, the only major datacentre investments of late have been to service social media giants or hyperscalers,” he told Computer Weekly. “AWS are building castles and data palaces while UK providers and SMEs are scrabbling around in the dirt, fighting for scraps.”

There are always exceptions, but we don’t consider repatriation to be a trend

Speaking to Computer Weekly, Ed Anderson, distinguished vice-president and analyst at IT market watcher Gartner, backed this view and said instances of enterprises repatriating their workloads from the cloud remain few and far between.

“Of course, there are always exceptions, but we don’t consider repatriation to be a trend,” he said. “As organisations evolve their use of technology to support their business needs, they consider the technology architectures that best meet those needs. In most cases, this results in a mix of cloud and on-premises datacentre solutions.”

Gartner is forecasting growth for both cloud and datacentre markets, Anderson continued, but with “cloud growth notably outpacing datacentre growth”.

“[This is] consistent with the trend we see of enterprise workloads continuing to be deployed in cloud environments,” he added.

“Whenever an enterprise considers alternatives in their IT purchase decisions, including the cloud services offered by AWS, Microsoft and Google, it represents a type of competitive threat … but cloud markets are healthy and growing, with the leading cloud providers well-positioned to capture much of that growth.”

Anderson’s colleague, Lydia Leong, distinguished vice-president analyst at Gartner, reiterated that cloud repatriation is not a trend the company is seeing in the enterprise market, whereas something that is occurring with increasing regularity is “lift and shift” migrations to the public cloud.

“There is no broad trend of ‘cloud migration reversal’ – it’s quite the opposite. As organisations react to the Broadcom acquisition of VMware, they are strongly considering lift-and-shift cloud migration, even though it is well-established that such migrations are suboptimal and historically have not resulted in cost savings.”