Rising costs, performance issues, and loss of control are pushing some businesses to rethink cloud-first infrastructure.
Over the past decade, "moving to the cloud" became the standard answer to almost every IT problem. "Scalability, simplicity & flexibility" sounded like the perfect solution for modern business.
But as companies mature, many are finding that cloud computing doesn’t always deliver the savings or control they expected. The initial migration often pays off, but costs creep up, performance can fluctuate, and dependency on a single provider starts to feel uncomfortable.
That’s why an increasing number of organisations are repatriating their workloads — bringing data and infrastructure back under their own control in colocation or private data centres.
Let’s look at six reasons why that shift is happening, and what businesses are gaining by taking a more balanced approach.
Cloud pricing looks simple on paper: "pay for what you use". But, in practice, it’s rarely that straightforward.
Between data-egress fees, API requests, backups, and usage-based scaling, cloud invoices can become unpredictable. Costs often spike without warning, and budgeting becomes difficult when your usage changes month to month.
By hosting servers or storage in a data centre, businesses get a more stable, flat-rate model. Power, bandwidth, and rack space are charged at fixed monthly rates, making budgeting far easier. You can scale on your own terms, without worrying that another project launch or backup sync will double your bill overnight.
Predictable costs don’t just make accountants happy — they also give you freedom to plan long-term infrastructure investments without surprises.
Public cloud platforms make it easy to get started, but moving away from them can be painful. Proprietary APIs, managed databases, and unique storage formats often tie your applications tightly to one ecosystem.
Running your systems in a neutral data centre helps you break that dependency. You regain control over your hardware, software stack, and connectivity. You can still connect to multiple cloud services — AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or niche platforms — but on your terms.
This multi-cloud or hybrid approach lets you pick the best tool for each job rather than being locked into one provider’s ecosystem or pricing model. It also makes it easier to negotiate costs when your workloads aren’t captive to a single vendor.
Public cloud infrastructure is, by nature, shared. Your virtual servers live alongside thousands of others, contending for the same CPU, storage, and network bandwidth.
That’s fine for many workloads, but if you need consistent performance — for example, database operations, video rendering, or latency-sensitive applications — the variability can become a problem.
By moving to dedicated hardware in a data centre, you eliminate those shared bottlenecks. Your systems can be tuned for the exact performance you need: faster storage, lower latency, or specific CPU/GPU configurations.
You’re not waiting for a noisy neighbour to finish their batch job, and your users get the same level of responsiveness every time.
Transferring large amounts of data into or out of the cloud can be surprisingly slow — and expensive. Uploading terabytes over the internet takes time, and cloud providers often charge significant fees for downloading your own data.
In a data centre environment, you can physically move storage in and out when needed. Handing over a secure drive in person can turn a multi-day transfer into a few hours. It’s faster, cheaper, and doesn’t monopolise your connection for days at a time.
For industries working with large media files, research datasets, or backups, this can save huge amounts of time and bandwidth.
Data protection rules like GDPR and ISO 27001 require organisations to know exactly where personal information is stored and who can access it. When your data is scattered across global cloud regions, compliance can get complicated.
Hosting within a local or national data centre simplifies that. You know which jurisdiction applies, and you can specify physical and logical security measures.
There’s also the matter of legal exposure. Under the US CLOUD Act, American cloud providers can be compelled to hand over data to US authorities, even if that data is hosted in Europe.
For UK and EU businesses handling sensitive information, this can raise genuine privacy concerns. By keeping your data on home soil, you maintain greater control and reduce the risk of cross-border access that could breach regulatory or contractual obligations.
Cloud platforms offer convenience, but support often stops at the portal. If something breaks, you’re one ticket in a long queue. Escalations can take days, and you might end up paying extra for "premium" response times or external consultants who know the platform’s quirks.
Data centres work differently. You get a human relationship — engineers who know your setup, understand your business, and can help directly when issues arise. There’s no passing between departments or waiting for permission to speak to a real person.
That hands-on, expert support is one of the main reasons businesses return to colocation. It turns infrastructure from an anonymous cloud service into a reliable partnership.
Cloud hosting promised simplicity and savings, and for some workloads it still delivers both. But for many organisations, the trade-offs — cost, control, performance, and support — have become too steep.
Repatriating to a data centre doesn’t mean abandoning the cloud entirely. Most companies now use a hybrid model, combining the scalability of cloud services with the predictability and control of private infrastructure.
The goal isn’t to be "anti-cloud." It’s to choose the right tool for each part of your business — whether that’s a hyperscale platform for global reach, or a well-managed rack of servers you can physically visit when it matters most.
We help businesses build that balance — connecting private data centre environments with cloud and on-prem systems to create resilient, cost-efficient, and fully compliant infrastructure.
If you’re rethinking your cloud strategy, it might be time to explore what life outside it can look like.
For more information, visit our Colocation Rackspace page or contact us with your questions.
