The growth of the public cloud is cannibalizing data center hardware vendors’ existing business and leading to those vendors’ propagation of cloud repatriation – but industry analysts have called out that messaging as an urban myth.

Cloud repatriation – or the process of moving workloads out of the public cloud to an on-premises data center, often to save costs – is an untrendy trend at best, Forrester analyst Naveen Chhabra told SDxCentral.

Despite growing sentiment that the cloud is too expensive (validated by Google Cloud’s recent effort to lower some data transfer fees), cloud repatriation tends to be “a costly exercise,” according to Gartner analyst Sid Nag.

A few genuine situations might prompt the need to move applications out of the public cloud: poor planning or an Application developed in the public cloud that was designed to run on-premises.

In that first situation, cloud repatriation doesn’t actually offer any advantages;. It’s more of a triage effort. In the second instance, an organization can avoid repatriation by using cloud-native DevOps technologies to develop the applications and workloads in the public cloud and optimized for that environment.

To that point, organizations should keep their workloads in the public cloud “whenever possible,” Nag told SDxCentral. It’s nearly impossible to reach the public cloud’s level of agility, innovation or scale in an on-premises environment.

Enterprises are sticking with the cloud

There’s a laundry list of reasons why cloud repatriation isn’t happening “as much as certain parts of the vendor ecosystem in the industry would like it to,” Chhabra said.

The cloud is typically seen as “an innovation powerhouse” and a marketplace where companies can access an entire ecosystem of services without needing to manually cobble them together in an on-premises data center.

If a company decides to move out of the cloud, it might be seen as backing away from a challenge, less innovative than its peers or unable to deal with the complexity of managing a cloud environment.

Enterprises will likely continue “going all out to expand their use of the cloud, not shrink it,” Chhabra said. When clients approach Forrester with an interest in cloud repatriation, for example, they usually end up staying in the cloud or increasing their exposure to the cloud.

In addition, cloud repatriation isn’t popular for technical reasons. The nature of the services available in the public cloud, like support and vendor ecosystems, likely aren’t available in an on-premises world – especially not if IT teams lift and shift out of the public cloud.

The proliferation of Software-as-a-Service in Enterprise environments and the amount of money spent on SaaS licenses are other factors keeping companies in the cloud.

If an Enterprise uses Salesforce, for example, and wants to repatriate its digital estate to on-premises, that won’t fly. “Guess what? There’s no Salesforce for your data center,” Chhabra said. “Innovation in the SaaS environment – there’s no way it can come back on-premises.”

Why push the cloud repatriation myth?

While companies like 37signals and Dropbox have publicized their cloud repatriation success stories, that doesn’t mean this is a broader industry trend. “These examples are highly publicized by a set of vendors who have significant stakes,” Chhabra said. “If I've done repatriation, and if I failed in that, would I want to go public with that information?”

Cloud repatriation might make sense “for organizations that have exposure to a single service or a limited set of cloud services for which there is an equivalent available in your data center,” he said. Dropbox and 37signals fall into that category.

But if an Enterprise uses a combination of 40 different cloud services from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, for instance, “there is no way that you can find the equivalent of all of those and set up that environment on your own,” Chhabra said.

On-premises data center hardware vendors like Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Dell Technologies, NetApp and Pure Storage “have vested interest in retaining clients or bringing new clients to their on-premises setup,” he said.

While public cloud providers have been growing at more than 25% annually in the last five years, data center vendors are losing a few percentage points each year. “It is all in their interest to 1) retain the customers and 2) bring back those who have gone to the cloud,” Chhabra said.

At the end of the day, considering cloud repatriation – especially for a one-off service like storage – is all about using a pragmatic, holistic approach.

“It is very easy to be swayed by the cost benefits that some vendors may demonstrate to you. I’m not saying that those are unreliable – you can realize those benefits…, but it has to be a well-thought-through plan, and it should not be a knee jerk reaction to some bad experiences in the cloud,” he said.