Itwerx is a service-disabled veteran-owned managed IT provider serving businesses in Seattle, Bellevue, Everett, Lynnwood and Snohomish County, founded in 2005, offering hybrid cloud design that keeps the workloads that belong in the cloud and moves the ones that do not.
Is your company “in the cloud,” and has it gotten expensive enough that leaving is on the table? It is worth being precise about what leaving actually involves, because the intuitive version of that plan – reverse the migration – is usually not available.
The spend data does not support a “companies are leaving” story
It is tempting to read every repatriation story as evidence that the cloud era is reversing. The spending data says otherwise. Enterprise cloud infrastructure spend hit roughly $91 billion in the fourth quarter of 2024 alone, up 22% year on year, closing out a full year at roughly $330 billion – about $60 billion more than the year before (Synergy Research Group, 6 Feb 2025). Amazon, Microsoft and Google between them still hold the large majority of that spend. Repatriation is a real and growing decision some businesses are making. It is not a retreat from the cloud in aggregate, and describing it that way overstates the case.
Why de-boarding is not a rollback
The harder problem with leaving is structural, not financial. One of the actual benefits of being in the cloud is having more capacity available on demand than an owned data center would ever justify buying outright. Plenty of businesses have deployed new applications since their original migration that were built assuming that flexibility exists – elastic storage, burst compute, capacity that scales without a hardware order. Treating “de-boarding” as a simple reversal of the original migration ignores that those newer applications may not function the same way, or at all, without the elasticity they were built against.
That is why the realistic version of this decision is rarely “all in” or “all out.” It is a workload-by-workload assessment of what genuinely needs elastic cloud capacity, what would run just as well – and more cheaply – on infrastructure the business controls directly, and how to manage both at once without doubling the administrative burden. That is the entire premise behind hybrid cloud as an approach, rather than a single migration project with a single finish line.
None of this is a claim that any particular migration away from a hyperscaler has already been delivered for a client – it is the structural argument for why that decision, when a business is ready to make it, deserves more care than “just move it back.”
Itwerx Corp is a service-disabled veteran-owned small business providing IT services across Seattle, Bellevue, Everett and Snohomish County. This is the kind of thing our hybrid cloud work deals with – talk to us about yours.
