The concept of “cloud-first” has long dominated enterprise IT strategy. However, recent, high-impact events have delivered a stark wake-up call, forcing executive teams to rethink where their most critical data resides.
The recent AWS outage and the massive 2024 Snowflake data breach have reignited a vital discussion about cloud repatriation—the strategic shift of critical workloads from the public cloud back to private or on-premises infrastructure.
If data is an organization’s most valuable asset, the simple underlying question is whether it can afford to entrust its operational continuity and sovereignty entirely to a third party.
Recent incidents highlight systemic fragility
These two incidents expose the inherent, systemic risks of excessive reliance on hyperscale public cloud providers, striking at both availability and security.
1. Availability and business continuity risk
On October 20, 2025, a major AWS outage, originating in the US-East-1 data center, disrupted countless global services for over nine hours, affecting major digital platforms, banks, and airlines. The root cause was a failed domain name system (DNS) update to DynamoDB, which cascaded into 113 affected services.
This incident highlights the broader implications of relying too heavily on a single provider. Even the most robust cloud platforms can encounter disruptions that ripple across dependent services.
2. Security and data sovereignty risk
The 2024 Snowflake data breach saw sensitive records compromised from over 160 organizations, including high-profile corporations like Santander, Ticketmaster, and AT&T. Attackers exploited weak authentication and stolen credentials to infiltrate customer environments.
This incident proves that even trusted, enterprise-grade cloud providers are not immune to compromise. When organizations entrust their sensitive data to a multi-tenant public environment, they are exposed to the aggregate security posture of the vendor and all its other clients.
The ability for a single-platform compromise to yield massive data breaches for global corporations demonstrates that consolidating critical assets creates a highly attractive target for sophisticated threat actors.
The strategic shift: Data backs the repatriation trend
In light of these mounting risks, cloud repatriation is no longer a niche trend but a significant movement reshaping IT infrastructure strategies. Data collected in partnership with Foundry confirms this accelerating shift:
- 67% of enterprises have already repatriated some workloads from a public cloud to an on-premise, private cloud, or hybrid environment.
- A significant majority, 87% of enterprises, plan to repatriate workloads in the next 12 to 24 months.
- While full withdrawal is rare, the hybrid model is the dominant architecture today, employed by 63% of organizations.
Top drivers: Security and control leading the charge
The shift is driven by the very concerns exposed by recent incidents. Concern regarding data security and privacy (51%) is the top driver for repatriating public cloud workloads.
While cost efficiency remains critical (cited by 39% as a driver), organizations also seek:
- Customization and control (35%): Repatriation enables tailored architectures, security policies, and access rules that are not possible with shared infrastructure.
- Data recovery/Business continuity (34%): This directly addresses the single-point-of-failure risk seen in the AWS outage.
- Performance: On-prem workloads frequently outperform cloud-hosted ones for data-intensive or low-latency applications.
Furthermore, AI/ML workloads (57%) are the top priority for repatriation in the next two years. These are data-intensive, costly to run at scale in the cloud, and demand tighter control over performance and governance.
The measurable benefits of strategic sovereignty
Repatriation is defined not as a rollback, but as a strategic upgrade in cost, security, and agility. Organizations that have successfully moved workloads report meaningful gains:
| Benefit | Repatriation Outcome | Supporting Data |
| Security posture | Improved security posture | 92% of organizations reported an improved overall security posture. |
| Data control | Enhanced visibility and privacy | 62% reported improved visibility, and 60% reported improved data privacy. |
| Cost efficiency | Reduced overall costs | 41% reported a decrease in overall costs. |
| ROI | Significant cost savings | Organizations reported an average cost savings of 31% across those repatriated workloads. |
| Performance | Faster performance | More than 50% experienced faster performance. |
Rethinking cloud strategy: An enterprise advantage
Cloud repatriation is a strategic realignment that moves beyond the simple “cloud-first” mandate to an “asset-centric” strategy. True digital resilience means owning both the data and its operational foundation. By repatriating critical assets, the business’s “Crown Jewels”—organizations achieve full sovereignty and dedicated security postures tailored to their unique regulatory needs.
The AWS outage exposed the fragility of dependency, while the Snowflake breach revealed the liabilities of consolidation. If data is indeed the organization’s most critical asset, delegating its operation to another entity is akin to outsourcing the company’s nervous system.
To understand the full scope of this movement and how to strategically identify workloads for swift repatriation, explore the resources that detail these findings:
- Get the full picture: Get a copy of The Cloud Repatriation Shift: What the Data Tells Us
- See the data: View the insights on The rise of cloud repatriation: Why enterprises are bringing data workloads home
