AWS says customers are turning back to on-prem

AWS, which one of the companies at the forefront of pushing companies to use cloud storage, has revealed a growing trend whereby customers are looking to reduce their reliance on cloud and revert back to on-prem options.

The news came during a hearing with the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which is investigating anticompetitive practices within Britain’s cloud market.

Amazon occupies around one-third of the cloud market globally, the equivalent of Microsoft and Google combined.

Are customers fed up of cloud’s unrealistic promises?

AWS admitted that customers are moving their workloads back to on-prem infrastructure in a move known as cloud repatriation. The trend highlights the flexibility and range of options that are available to customers, as well as the varied use cases and associated benefits.

Amazon’s cloud division said that customers may be doing this for any number of reasons, including: “to reallocate their own internal finances, adjust their access to technology and increase the ownership of their resources, data and security.”

One of the key drivers could be cost – cloud once promised to be a cost-effective way to access data anywhere, but on-prem and hybrid infrastructure is beginning to blur the boundaries.

However, while AWS acknowledged evolving competition from on-prem infrastructure providers, the company doesn’t seem to be overly bothered about the trend. AWS believes that companies are migrating on a workload-by-workload basis, and many are exploring hybrid and multicloud setups where they don’t entirely abandon AWS.

That being said, strong competition is causing AWS to reevaluate its business practices, and ongoing global investigations into anticompetitive behavior across the entire cloud sector means that cloud hosting companies and responding to pressures from these organizations and customers to offer greater flexibility and cost efficiency.

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