As part of our ongoing commitment at Finopotamus to cover the tech topics you won't see in other credit union outlets, we're pleased to offer a very important episode of TechSolutions4CUs on a very important topic: cloud repatriation. This episode features cloud repatriation experts Kevin Heisser and Ian Nock from ArcShift. Cloud repatriation is becoming an increasingly popular idea as organizations that moved all their operations to the cloud are now realizing there’s a strong argument for bringing some of their workload back on-premise.

The ArcShift co-founders explain that their company was founded to address what they see as a backward trend in the tech industry, where solutions are often driven by vendor incentives and sales quotas rather than customer needs. ArcShift’s mission is to put people back in control of their data and save them money. They emphasize that they are not suggesting organizations should pull everything out of the cloud, but rather advocating for a hybrid approach. This hybrid model allows organizations to keep some functions in the cloud, while moving certain workloads back on-premise for reasons such as cost savings, security, and performance.

One of the main reasons more organizations aren't pursuing cloud repatriation is the strong bias from tech vendors, who profit from the high profit margins and annual recurring revenue (ARR) of cloud services. Cloud companies also make it very easy to migrate data into the cloud with various tools, but make it very difficult to get data out. 

Another factor is that IT professionals may be overwhelmed and hesitant to move their production workloads for fear of downtime or other complications. ArcShift addresses this by providing a platform and toolset that make the repatriation process easy and seamless, including a TCO (total cost of ownership) tool to help organizations assess potential savings.

In addition to cost savings, other benefits of cloud repatriation include enhanced security and better support. In the cloud, hardware is often shared, and there is a risk of misconfigurations or vulnerabilities that can expose data. When a problem occurs, a company with a small infrastructure may not receive timely support from public cloud providers. AI workloads are particularly good candidates for repatriation due to their high cost in the cloud. The cost of running AI infrastructure in the cloud can be "enormously" expensive, and companies are finding that they can buy their own infrastructure for a fraction of the cost and have more control. ArcShift is vendor-agnostic, meaning they do not sell any hardware or software, so their recommendations are unbiased and focused solely on the customer's needs.