Cloud exit: when moving back out of the public cloud pays off

Cloud repatriation - the deliberate move of workloads out of the public cloud - has gone mainstream in 2026. Market observers now put IDC at 71 percent of surveyed companies counted as "repatriators", while a Barclays CIO survey puts the figure at 86 percent of CIOs planning to bring back at least part of their workloads. But does it actually pay off for you?

Why companies move back in the first place

• Underestimated costs: as early as 2023, an IDC study found that 69 percent of surveyed IT decision-makers said actual cloud costs exceeded their original expectations.
• Cloud waste: according to Flexera’s "State of the Cloud Report 2024", companies estimate that up to 32 percent of their cloud spend goes unused or is used inefficiently.
• Egress costs: the cost of transferring data out of the cloud is regularly underestimated in the original calculation.
• Data sovereignty: GDPR, DORA and - for KRITIS operators - the KRITIS-Dachgesetz are increasingly turning data sovereignty into a strategic rather than purely technical question.

What an exit actually costs

Publicly known cases show both sides of the equation: upfront investment in your own hardware typically ranges from €500,000 to €2 million, plus staffing costs for operations and migration. Against that stand sometimes substantial ongoing savings - widely cited press examples include Dropbox, which reportedly saved around $75 million over two years, and 37signals, at roughly $2 million per year. These figures don’t transfer one to one, but they show that with sufficiently stable, predictable load, owning your own infrastructure can clearly pay off.

When an exit is worth it - and when it isn’t

A full cloud exit pays off above all for workloads with stable, predictable load, high data volume and long usage horizons - classic candidates are storage, databases and internal applications without strong load spikes. Highly variable or seasonal workloads often remain cheaper in the cloud. The most realistic answer is usually not "all or nothing", but a deliberate, per-workload hybrid decision.

Our approach: a cloud exit strategy instead of a gut call

That’s exactly why we offer a cloud exit strategy as a dedicated service: we assess, vendor-neutrally, which workloads can economically move to dedicated infrastructure - and which are deliberately better off staying in the cloud.

Sources: IDC (2023, 2026), Flexera "State of the Cloud Report" (2024), Barclays CIO survey (2026).