They talk about a large-scale repatriation project by a pretty sizable organization. The poster child for cloud repatriation (followed IMMEDIATELY by "please, whatever you do, do NOT ask us for a second example because we're fresh out") is Dropbox. The cloud topic that got me ruminating about those long-ago rainy days is called "cloud repatriation." . Dropbox saved nearly $75 million by repatriating workloads from the public cloud and building its own tech infrastructure, the company detailed in its S-1 . Although Dropbox was actually born in the cloud -- originally started on AWS - it has since moved more than 600 petabytes of data . The three main drivers of cloud repatriation include: 1. Why are Companies Shifting Workloads Back to On-Premise Resources? Now, on to Wang and Casado's idea of "repatriating" cloud workloads. What's also driving organizations to take that step, though . You may have heard of them: Dropbox. The majority of which included data repatriation of workloads from public cloud. Repatriating $100M of annual public cloud spend can translate to roughly less than half of annual total cost of ownership (TCO) from server racks, real estate, and cooling to network and engineering costs. Martin Casado, a . Aug 25, 2022 In 2022, one percent of respondents state that their organization intends to replace, remove, or put AWS in containment. Legacy application architectures often see lower availability, poor performance and high cost when directly migrated into the cloudleading to a return of those IT functions back to legacy deployments (repatriation). Consider the controversy raised by Andreessen Horowitz when it published "The Cost of Cloud, a Trillion Dollar Paradox" and suggested companies were repatriating from the cloud and realizing significant cost savings as a result. I suspect that cloud repatriation is wishful thinking by vendors experiencing a lack of server and storage sales. Still, cost should not be the only factor considered. Sure, maybe IT . Both big and small companies are leaving the public cloud. The biggest name in the cloud repatriation story is Dropbox. In 2016, they moved most of their data from AWS to their own colocation resources, which, according to their S-1, saved them just under $75 million in OpEx over two years. An IDC survey discovered that 80% of respondents moved cloud workloads on-premises or to a private cloud solution within the past year. Andreesen Horowitz investors Sarah Wang and Martin Casado recently argued that moving to the cloud hurts profit . Most business' will choose a hybrid or private cloud. While repatriation may ultimately be a good . Once you store massive amounts of data in the cloud, moving that data back on prem or to another cloud vendor becomes a significant undertaking. Additionally, Dropbox, one of the world's largest data and image storage platforms, has reportedly saved over $75 million over two years after moving a vast portion of their data to a private . Incumbents are notoriously famous for their IT legacy. Worse, if you do manage to repatriate, you'll loose the price transparency. The first, as mentioned above, is if your public cloud expenses have crept beyond what an on premise solution would cost. When the company embarked on its infrastructure optimization initiative in 2016, they saved nearly $75M over two years by shifting the majority of their workloads from public cloud to "lower cost, custom-built infrastructure in co-location facilities" directly leased and operated by Dropbox. The company started in the cloud using Amazon Web Services and shifted to its own data centers in 2015, relocating nearly 600 petabytes of its customer data to its own network of data centers. This also helps with governance and compliance, reducing the fear of shadow IT or new technologies being spun up in corners of the office that are difficult to manage. One company that has done this is Dropbox, which, after growing to 500 petabytes on public cloud, took its data back to three owned data centers in 2016. . Repatriating can force staff to work on common tech in a streamlined IT environment that traverses single areas of the business. This also helps with governance and compliance, reducing the fear of shadow IT or new technologies being spun up in corners of the office that are difficult to manage. When the company embarked on its infrastructure optimization initiative in 2016, they. However . So a discussion about repatriation is an opportunity to think about what implementations are best suited to the cloud. This is a heady . Dropbox and New Belgium Brewing are two high profile examples of organizations who have repatriated their primary applications. Cloud computing . Cloud repatriation is the movement of part or all of a business components off the cloud back to on-premise or colocation into a Data Centre. At the same time, there is. The company started in the cloud using Amazon Web Services and shifted to its own data centers in 2015, relocating nearly 600 petabytes of its customer data to its own network of data centers. Although Dropbox was actually born in the cloud originally started on AWS it has since moved more than 600 petabytes of data from Amazon's cloud to its own data centers. Digital Transformation and the Cloud. This migration reduced Dropbox's data center expenses by nearly $75M over the following two years. Learn the challenges faced by organizations in moving data from on-premise to cloud and the repatriating cloud data. Tag your resources well and it's easy to see where the dollars are going and make targetted improvements. In 2017, Dropbox list $75M in savings over the two years prior to IPO due to their infrastructure optimization overhaul. Dropbox is a prominent example of an early cloud repatriation. What about Dropbox? [] Hyperconverged infrastructure is one development that has nudged enterprises in this direction. so to help generalize the potential savings from cloud repatriation to a broader set of companies, thomas dullien, former google engineer and co-founder of cloud computing optimization company. Dropbox is a prominent example of an early cloud repatriation. Cloud repatriation made sense in the case of Dropbox since their main business is "Storage" with. Those who have done this have reported significant cost savings: In 2017, Dropbox detailed in its S-1 a whopping $75M in cumulative savings over the two years prior to IPO due to their infrastructure optimization overhaul, the majority of which entailed repatriating workloads from the public cloud. Cloud costs are a large % of Cost of Sales (often times 50-80%) Cloud providers operate on large margins (e.g. . They found it was cheaper to operate their own equipment than to continue hosting in the cloud. Second, the public cloud itself really is only one way of using cloud computing. The biggest name in the cloud repatriation story is Dropbox. For others . By repatriating cloud workloads, organizations can address mistakes they made in earlier stages of digital transformation. As a result, many large organizations, including the likes of Dropbox that was built in the cloud, have taken the dramatic and paradoxical step of "repatriating" their data, according to a recent report from analysts at Andreesen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm. But repatriation shouldn't be on the menu: it's hard enough finding engineers to work in the cloud, let along build, secure and maintain your own infrastructure. They repatriated. Here's why cloud repatriation should be a part of modern digital transformation. By Eric Murithi Muchenah Jul 12, 2020. Cloud migration refers to the processing of transferring data, services, and applications from a local data center to a cloud computing environment. 2. Cloud technologies may be deployed on-premises . There are a plethora of reasons for this workload transition. Repatriation results in one-third to one-half the cost of running equivalent workloads in the cloud. THE CASE FOR REPATRIATION. Public cloud repatriation itself is a somewhat taboo topic in certain circles. The Dropbox repatriation: statistical cherry-picking What's more, by extrapolating the results of successful repatriations to the wider ecosphere of cloud consumers, the authors take entirely too many liberties with the notion that one cloud deployment can be easily compared with another from a cost perspective. In those documents, it disclosed the impact the move has had on its bottom line. Repatriation, in which an enterprise pulls back from public cloud to bring infrastructure back in-house, has shown promise in reducing costs and boosting profit margins. Additionally, Dropbox, one of the world's largest data and image storage platforms, has reportedly saved over $75 million over two years after moving a vast portion of their data to a private cloud environment. In short, they migrated back from the cloud. Unit economics of cloud repatriation: The case of Dropbox, and beyond. It boiled down to " cloud repatriation" by migrating most of their workloads to their own collocated infrastructure. Public, Private, Hybrid Cloud, or Repatriation . They cited Dropbox who "saved nearly $75M over two years by shifting the majority of their workloads from public cloud to 'lower cost, custom-built infrastructure in co-location facilities' directly leased and operated by Dropbox." Dropbox filed Friday for an initial public offering, seeking to raise an estimated $500 million for the Silicon Valley cloud storage startup. That such a large company would move largely off public cloud, where startups often begin and established companies shed legacy systems to get to, seemed an anomaly. Arguably the most successful example of repatriation is how Dropbox saved $75m in cumulative savings thanks to their infrastructure optimization project, mostly repatriating their workloads from public cloud in 2017. The San Francisco company claimed 500 million users in 180 countries and $1 billion in annual revenues in documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. To dimensionalize the cost of cloud, and understand the magnitude of potential savings from optimization, let's start with a more extreme case of large scale cloud repatriation: Dropbox. so to help generalize the potential savings from cloud repatriation to a broader set of companies, thomas dullien, former google engineer and co-founder of cloud computing optimization company optimyze, estimates that repatriating $100m of annual public cloud spend can translate to roughly less than half that amount in all-in annual total cost of Related: Dropbox's Reverse Migration, From Cloud to Own Data Centers, Five Years On. Dropbox started its Magic Pocket project to move workloads off AWS, back in 2016. . With their unbridled growth ambition, the risk that scale-ups . Most of the time, the cloud improves your performance, providing access to limitless resources in line with demand great for unexpected peaks in traffic or service. In the case of Dropbox, repatriation generated USD 75 million of savings over two years and gross margins went up from 33 % ( 2015 pre repatriation) to 67% in 2017. The Dropbox repatriation: statistical cherry-picking What's more, by extrapolating the results of successful repatriations to the wider ecosphere of cloud consumers, the authors take entirely too. Dropbox best example for that: their 2016 repatriation project saved them $75M over 2 yrs but they lost product leadership during that time. Before their IPO in 2018, Dropbox started with a massive cloud optimization program in 2016. This is not an isolated case, there are plenty of examples of Cloud repatriation (companies migrating from public to private cloud offerings). One of the more famous cases of "cloud repatriation" - when a company rebalances load back towards private from public - is Dropbox. What is this "repatriation" thing? Today the company has precision control of its IT costs as it continues to grow, taking . A study by venture capital firm 'Andreessen Horowitz' found that cloud repatriation results in one-third to one-half the cost of running equivalent workloads in the cloud. This counterintuitive trend has two different aspects. Thus, it's not surprising that Yang and Casado use the company to demonstrate the degree of waste SaaS companies incur by continuing to use cloud infrastructure. The gross margin of Dropbox doubled in two years: from 33 % to 67 %, primary to the repatriation. An estimated $100B of market value is being lost across 50 of the top public software companies due to the clouds impact on margins. The same report also shows that that across 50 of the top public software companies currently utilizing cloud . It suits specific use cases such as Dropbox or Netflix, who built their own data. Cloud repatriation the practice of retrieving applications or workloads from public clouds and moving them elsewhereis an increasingly valuable tool CIOs can leverage. Large enterprises have started exploring cloud repatriation.After Dropbox's move from the public cloud resulted in $75M savings over two years and doubling its gross margin, Andreessen Horowitz conducted a study and found that cloud spending could go up as high as 80% of the cost of the revenue for software companies. Dropbox's cloud repatriation (for a substantial part of their workloads) is writing on the wall for every CEO, CFO, and CTO of scale-ups: get your act together on cloud economics and possibly consider a hybrid cloud strategy. Their S-1 filing claimed they'd reduced operating costs by $74.6 million over the two years following their going public. The most startling example of cost savings accrued by leaving the public cloud is Dropbox, which s aved nearly $75 million in two years by repatriating their workloads from the public cloud to colocation facilities. Today, the cloud is the go-to platform for hosting digital and traditional workloads for enterprises in every industry. From 2015 to 2016, Dropbox saved $39.5 million in the cost of revenue bucket thanks to the project, which reduced spending on "our third-party datacenter service provider" by $92.5 million offset. Moving workloads in and out of the cloud isn't really possibleor a good idea. In this article, I'll discuss one of these trends: Workload Repatriation. Dropbox says that the move has given them . They brought the servers home. Dropbox is the archetype those making the cloud repatriation argument invariably highlight to bolster their case. Andreessen Horowitz partner Martin Casado says the cost of cloud computing is a $100 billion drag on the biggest software companies, sparking a huge debate across the industry. Dropbox woos users with a free version of its online file-storing service, then entices . for Dropbox, this meant building its own storage infrastructure. However About two years ago, Dropbox moved most of its data - including users' data - from Amazon Web Services, which it had relied on since its founding, to its own custom infrastructure in colocation data centers.. Last week, the popular cloud storage and collaboration service filed documents for an IPO. Cost Savings Repatriating to a private cloud offers more transparency into pricing structures, and the pay-as-you-go approach allows companies to pay for services much like a utility. Dropbox is the poster child for cloud repatriation, in no small part because there are so few companies actually repatriating workloads. The Nebraska Vision AWS at 30%) Repatriation could reduce costs 30-50% of existing cloud spend. For example, you might have virtual machines hosted on a service like Amazon EC2 or Azure Virtual Machines that you migrate back to an on-premises data center. Notably, the two cloud players (AWS and Microsoft) have the. It saved the company shedloads of money, and yet we've not seen a huge and public movement out of the cloud. You can also use smart best-practices with geographical regions that could make all the difference to latency or bandwidth. In 2018, Dropbox announced it was shifting away from cloud-based services in favor of managing some of its data storage and application hosting itself. There are three models of cloud migration. According to the Dropbox S-1, the cloud storage company saved a whopping $75 million by shifting from public cloud storage "to our own lower cost, custom-built infrastructure in co-location. The idea was explained well in May 2021 by Sarah Wang and Martin Casado at Andreessen Horowitz, who coined the "cloud repatriation" term: . The results: Dropbox's gross margins increased from 33% to 67% from 2015 to 2017. Repatriating can force staff to work on common tech in a streamlined IT environment that traverses single areas of the business. For every GE going all-in with AWS, it seems there's a Dropbox leaving (at least in part) for the greener pastures of a private, self-managed environment. Workload repatriation is the phenomenon in which a workload that was initially developed and deployed in a public cloud is brought back to a private or managed cloud. Cloud repatriation is a shift of workloads from the public cloud to local infrastructure environments, and this trend is picking up speed. What authors Sarah Wang and Martin Casado describe in their Andreesen Horowitz analysis is something completely different. Why Dropbox is a terrible example for building the cloud repatriation case. First, the major trends do show strong growth in public cloud adoption, but what this may not reflect is an actual drop in on-premises deployments and IT systems. In its S-1, Dropbox claimed a $75 million savings in cloud spend by moving some workloads to its own data centers. Cloud Repatriation Is Real. Those who have done this have reported significant cost savings: In 2017, Dropbox detailed in its S-1 a whopping $75M in cumulative savings over the two years prior to IPO due to their. Speaking in terms of dollars, a recent post from a16z gives us a real-world example around cloud cost and repatriation. Repatriation Savings! Dropbox didn't completely drop AWS and they still use many of their services, especially in Europe. Or, you may replace . There are plenty more examples . The canonical example of cost-saving through repatriation of cloud loads to on-premises is Dropbox, which the researchers said "saved nearly $75m over two years by shifting the majority of their workloads to lower cost, custom-built infrastructure in co-location facilities, directly leased and operated by Dropbox." As an example, Dropbox saved nearly US$75 million over two years by shifting most of their workloads from public cloud to "lower cost, custom-built infrastructure in co-location facilities". The most popular model is where people move data and applications from an on-premises data center to a public cloud. Finance has spun out of control Counterpoint: running your own infrastructure has huge opportunity costs as fewer dev resources are available for customer-facing features. As a16z tells it, Dropbox returned to the pre-cloud model of hosting their own racked servers in data centers. In 2018, Dropbox detailed a US$75 million in cumulative savings over the two years prior to its IPO, something it said was largely due to its repatriation of workloads from the public cloud, onto its own IT infrastructure. The company noted that while Amazon Web Services (AWS) initially allowed Dropbox to delay the purchase and maintenance of its own infrastructure, there were limitations and obstacles that prompted the switch. The latter phenomenon has a memorable, if not controversial new label, cloud repatriation, as if like Dolly in the musical, the workloads are going back home where they belong. Put simply, cloud repatriation is the process of moving applications or data that currently run in the public cloud to an infrastructure other than the public cloud.