According to a shocking study by Citrix, a Cloud Software Group business unit, a quarter of UK firms have already moved half or more of their online data back to their servers.

The survey grilled 350 IT bosses on their current cloud computing plans. It also showed that 93 per cent of them had been involved with a cloud repatriation project in the past three years. That's a lot of repatriation.

Security worries and high project hopes were the main reasons (33 per cent) for shifting some online data back to their own servers, such as enterprise data centres, colocation providers, and managed service providers (MSPs).

Another big factor was the failure to meet internal expectations, at 24 per cent... Those surveyed moaned about unexpected costs, performance glitches, compatibility issues, and service blackouts.

The most common reason for repatriation was cost. In the survey, more than 43 per cent of IT chiefs found that moving apps and data from their servers to the cloud was pricier than expected.

Although not part of the survey, the cost of running apps and storing data on the cloud has also been much more costly than most firms expected. The cost-benefit analysis of the cloud versus its servers varies greatly depending on the firm.

The cloud is a good fit for modern apps that use many services, such as serverless, containers, or clustering. But that doesn't describe most firm apps.

However, it is not a case of feeling sorry for the public cloud providers.

Any losses from repatriation will be quickly replaced by the massive amounts of infrastructure needed to build and run AI-based systems. Cloud conferences have become genAI conferences, which will go on for several years.