Todd Lieb, Dell’s vice-president of cloud partnerships, remembers meeting with the global architect for a global insurance company around the time of the pandemic. The conversation turned to repatriation, which, as it happened, had seen the insurer move some workloads back on-prem. “We had a problem in our datacentre,” said the insurer, whom Lieb doesn’t name. “We moved that problem to the cloud, and it became a more expensive problem. So, we’re moving it back.” The pandemic saw accelerated growth in cloud services, with many hyperscalers reporting strong adoption. “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in 2020. Five years later, Lieb says customers are finally experiencing the full cost and complexity of cloud computing.

Setting up cloud workloads requires the same security, operational resilience and backup capabilities as on-premises environments. In other words, it takes a lot of effort to ensure cloud deployments have the necessary operational capabilities – even with the cloud providers helping. Then there’s AI.