Why Cloud Is No Longer the Only Option

Strategic Shift in IT Infrastructure

For years, “cloud-first” was considered strategic best practice – fast, scalable, modern, and seemingly without real alternatives. But in 2025, it becomes clear: the cloud is not a universal success model. Companies are increasingly challenged to reassess their infrastructure decisions – not ideologically, but based on facts. Economic viability, digital sovereignty, regulatory pressure and technological maturity are reshaping the rules.

Cloud Repatriation: From Exception to Strategic Move

By 2025, many companies are undergoing a shift in infrastructure strategy. Looking back, the cloud hype of the past decade now seems almost naive: public cloud was considered flexible, affordable, modern – and above all, inevitable. Today, this perspective has clearly changed. The question is no longer if the cloud, but when, for what and under what conditions cloud services make sense at all.

Not every migration to the cloud has proven to be sustainable. In many organizations, a sense of strategic sobriety has emerged: rising operating costs, legal uncertainty, and technical dependencies are driving a reassessment of existing architecture choices.

Cloud Repatriation Is No Longer a Niche Topic

What once seemed like an exception has become part of strategic planning: more and more companies are pulling critical workloads back from the cloud – a trend that’s far beyond its niche status and increasingly recognized as a strategic move.

According to Flexera’s State of the Cloud Report, 84% of organizations report difficulties controlling their cloud spend. Roughly 30% of that spend is categorized as “cloud waste” – resources that are paid for but never used productively. Especially in data-heavy domains like AI, analytics, or SaaS with high utilization, cloud economics have become problematic. In such scenarios, repatriation offers the chance to regain predictability and efficiency.

Legal and Geopolitical Conditions Gain Strategic Weight

Beyond economic criteria, legal and geopolitical frameworks are gaining importance – particularly for companies handling sensitive or regulated data.

Legal uncertainty around transatlantic data transfers, growing pressure to comply with European cloud certifications (EUCS), and initiatives like GAIA-X are increasingly shaping infrastructure strategies. These developments affect not just public institutions, but also organizations in research, industry, and financial services – wherever technical control and legal certainty must go hand in hand. For a detailed analysis of these factors, see Part 3 of this series:

From Dogma to Differentiated Architecture Principles

Over the past years, many organizations have learned: infrastructure decisions cannot be made based on generalizations. Neither cloud nor classic on-premise models are inherently “better” – what matters is the context:

• What is the workload profile?
  – Constant load or highly variable? Short-term or long-term planning horizon?
• What regulatory or internal data handling requirements apply?
  – Think GDPR, export control, public funding, banking regulation
• How tightly is the workload integrated with existing systems?
  – Is it dependent on local networks, identity systems, or security infrastructure?
• What level of scalability is needed – and on what timeline?
  – Short bursts for development or sustained performance at scale?

These questions can’t be answered with standard recipes. But they help objectify the strategy process – through long-term TCO modeling, compliance mapping, and honest assessments of internal capabilities.

One-size-fits-all architecture paradigms – such as “cloud-first” or “on-prem-only” – are outdated. What matters today is differentiation: the ability to make architecture decisions based on actual technical, economic, and legal requirements.

Conclusion: Cloud Is a Tool – Nothing More, Nothing Less

By 2025, infrastructure decisions can no longer be made in binary terms. Regulatory demands, data protection, rising costs, and geopolitical uncertainty have increased the complexity of the decision landscape. At the same time, the range of available deployment models and technologies is broader than ever: from public clouds to private stacks to highly specialized on-premise systems.

New application scenarios – particularly in AI – are also changing the requirements around performance, data control, and integration. The cloud remains an important tool, especially for burst loads, global scale, or agile development – but only if cost, compliance and dependency risks are actively managed.

In this context, it’s worthwhile to revisit existing strategies and answer infrastructure questions with nuance – based on concrete workloads, economic realities, and regulatory conditions.

Coming Up in Part 2

In the next article, we’ll explore when on-premise infrastructure makes economic sense, what FinOps thinking brings to private IT environments – and which rule-of-thumb benchmarks offer orientation for TCO assessments.