INTHEBLACK November 2026 - Magazine - Page 28
FEATURE
“In manufacturing or other operational settings where
disruption could halt production, on-premise infrastructure
remains important because latency, reliability and immediate
access are critical.”
ROSALIE ADRIANO FCPA, RA INSPIRED
IDC says the cloud repatriation “is a growing
trend”, but adds that only 8 to 9 per cent of
organisations plan a full exit from the public
cloud. The remainder, it says, are organisations
repatriating some workloads while keeping
others in the public cloud and adopting
a hybrid approach.
According to an August 2026 report by
research publisher Programs, the worldwide
demand for data storage centres is expected
to nearly triple by 2030 to store the massive
amounts of data that companies and consumers
are generating and accessing. At least 225
new data centres are currently being proposed
for development in Australia alone.
Thanks to the proliferation of AI applications,
the volume of data being created, transferred
and stored continues to rise — but that does
not mean all of it belongs in the public cloud.
WHAT IS OPTIMAL?
The question is not whether companies
should move from the public cloud to
on-premise, but which workloads should
sit where.
Sfondrini says infrastructure decisions
are shifting from “cloud first” to a “what is
optimal” mentality.
“Asking that question in 2019 was simple.
The better question to ask now is: where will
each individual workload operate at optimal
efficiency based on economics, risk profile,
performance needs and strategic value?”
he says. This makes a hybrid cloud strategy
an increasingly important consideration.
Dr Dimitrios Salampasis, associate dean and
associate professor of emerging technologies
and fintech at Swinburne University of
Technology in Melbourne, agrees that
organisations are becoming more selective
about which workloads belong in the public
cloud, private infrastructure, a sovereign cloud
[owned by the organisation] or hybrid models.
“The public cloud remains attractive for
variable demand, rapid experimentation,
28 INTHEBLACK November 2026
global deployment and managed services;
while very large, stable, data-intensive or
regulated workloads can justify private,
sovereign or hybrid infrastructure,” he says.
“Building a private cloud is very difficult.
So, I think the retainment of mainframes
remains particularly relevant for banks,
insurers and governments because of their
high-volume transactional workloads.”
Rosalie Adriano FCPA, founder and
managing director of advisory business
RA Inspired, and a member of CPA Australia’s
Digital Transformation Centre of Excellence,
says decisions about cloud and on-premise
infrastructure should be driven by business
need rather than ideology.
She argues that there is no universal
answer — the right model depends on
the organisation’s operating environment,
risk profile and tolerance for downtime.
“In manufacturing or other operational
settings where disruption could halt production,
on-premise infrastructure remains important
because latency, reliability and immediate access
are critical,” Adriano says. “By contrast, offices,
distribution centres and enterprise platforms
may be better suited to cloud or hybrid
arrangements, particularly where flexibility
and scalable capacity are valuable.”
Adriano cautions that cost comparisons
can be misleading if they focus only on
visible IT spend. Using the public cloud
may reduce some upfront or dedicated
capacity costs, but organisations must assess
the end-to-end impact, including resilience,
redundancy, operational continuity and
downstream consequences.
TALLYING THE COSTS
The decision to repatriate data from the
cloud to on-premise is more than a capital
expenditure versus an operational expenditure
decision, Salampasis says.
“The relevant measure is the risk-adjusted
total cost per useful unit of computing,
