Cloud providers have always sold convenience. Compute on demand, storage that scales, and somewhere in the fine print, the implied promise that someone else is watching the infrastructure. For a lot of teams, that last item was the most valuable thing they were paying for, whether they knew it or not.
That arrangement is starting to come apart.
The Numbers
Cloudian's 2026 research report surveyed 212 senior IT decision makers and found that 75% had moved workloads from the cloud back to on-premises infrastructure in the prior 24 months. That is not a rounding error or a niche trend. Three out of four senior IT professionals at organizations large enough to have senior IT professionals made a deliberate choice to bring their data and compute closer to home.
The reasons are not surprising. Security and compliance pressure is one driver, and the growth of AI workloads is another. Michael Gale, CMO at EDB, put it plainly in a recent IT Brew piece, “If you want to use AI and data, you’ve got to be secure and compliant, they’ve got to be next to each other.” Sending proprietary data to a third-party cloud provider to feed a general-purpose model is increasingly hard to justify when purpose-built, containerized, on-premises alternatives exist.
