Cloud Repatriation: Why 86% and 9% Are Two Different Stories

You have probably seen the headline: "86% of IT leaders are moving workloads back from the cloud." The number is real, but it is quoted incompletely and for a small business, that gap is the difference between a sound decision and an expensive migration you did not need.

The number that gets quoted

In the Barclays CIO survey, 86% said they planned to move some of their workloads from public cloud to private or on-premises infrastructure. The operative word is "some", not "all".

The number that gets left out

IDC research puts full-scale repatriation at just 8–9% of organisations. So of every ten companies that answered "yes", roughly one is actually leaving the cloud. The rest are selectively relocating specific workloads — not retreating.

Why the difference matters to you

Read only the first headline and you conclude "the cloud has failed", then move infrastructure that was working fine. Gartner expects around 90% of organisations to run hybrid infrastructure by 2027. The real shift is not cloud versus your own servers; it is deciding workload by workload.

The cost that grew this year

According to Flexera's 2026 State of the Cloud report, wasted cloud spend rose from 27% to 29%  the first increase after five straight years of decline. The main driver is AI workloads: resources that are quick to switch on and slow to switch off. If you have started a service and nobody owns turning it off, that is where your waste begins.

Bottom line

The right question is not "cloud or not". It is: which workload, with which usage pattern, is cheaper and more controllable where? The answer for your always-on database is not the answer for your archived files — and without measuring your current usage pattern, both answers are guesses.