Leaving the Cloud
A student of mine did a rather good thesis on de-clouding. In the
process she discovered the term &quot;cloud repatriation&quot; a fair bit of
literature on the movement to bring control of data and hardware back
&#x27;on-prem&#x27;.<p>She also noted that when you search on these terms the main engines
(all run by cloud service providers) return poor results not congruent
with the scale of the phenomenon. They are dominated by the opposite
message obviously heavily SEO&#x27;d up to the top, plus shill pieces
pushing cloud services but presented as &quot;critical&quot;. Dig deep if you
want to find the real scale of the &quot;anti-cloud&quot; issues.<p>Her main conclusion was very interesting though. That the big issue is
not finance, reliability or control - but de-skilling.<p>As companies move their operations out to the cloud it&#x27;s not the
disappearance of hardware from the premises but the loss of
skill-sets.  Later they don&#x27;t even know who to hire or how to write
the JD to bring people back in.<p>A good example was the broadcast industry. Entire branches of that
industry doing post-production, colour, transcoding, and whatnot moved
it all out to AWS. After price hikes, they wanted to go back to
running their own services. But they can&#x27;t. Because nobody knows about
how to set-up and run that any longer - especially specialist things
like buffers and transcoders. I mean, try finding a sys-admin who can
just do simple tasks like set up and properly configure a mail server
these days.