Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation

What I was surprised to find in some big orgs is the processes have not evolved to be cloud first. There is lack of maturity, still a chain of committees, approvals, and manual processes; risk management still treats the services as a giant intranet, deployments are not scripted, ad hoc designs. Resources are placed in vnets so that they resemble a system they already know, and comes with all the associated risks.

This is the reality IME. I'm currently in an org that has been "in the cloud" for over ten years but is only now architecting (some) new projects in a cloud-first way. Meanwhile there is big pressure to get out of our rented cages so there is even more lift-and-shift migration happening. My guess is that we eat roughly 5x as much compute as we would need with proper scaling, and paying cloud prices for almost all of it.

Yep transition to cloud-first is still such a challenge for many big organizations

Any large scale transition actually !

The transition has to be accompanied by a revamp of all the technical processes associated with IT provisioning, which is too much and too risky to do.

Change can be tough