Debunking the myth of cloud repatriation SHARE Cloud repatriation is a term often used by technology companies that don’t operate a public cloud. The marketing narrative most typically implies that customers have moved work to the public cloud and, for a variety of reasons – expense, performance, security – are disillusioned with the cloud and as a result are “repatriating” workloads back to their safe, comfy and cost-effective on-premises data center. Although we have no doubt this does sometimes happen, the data suggest that this is a minor, single-digit phenomenon. Some have written about the repatriation myth, but in this Breaking Analysis, we’ll share hard data from ETR and other sources that we feel debunks the repatriation narrative as it’s currently being promoted. We’ll also take this opportunity to do our quarterly cloud update and share our latest figures for the Big 4 cloud providers.