For much of the last decade, Public Cloud has been positioned as the default destination for modern IT. Speed, flexibility and low barriers to entry made it attractive, especially for teams under pressure to deliver quickly.
But as Cloud estates mature, many organisations are asking a more pragmatic question: is Public Cloud still the right place for all of our workloads?
Increasingly, the answer is no longer a simple yes. A more sensible approach is emerging: keep Cloud where it genuinely adds value, and place steady, predictable workloads where they are cheaper to run, easier to govern and easier to performance-manage. This is where Cloud repatriation and Colocation in particular, become relevant.
Why Cloud Repatriation is Accelerating
Cloud repatriation is the selective return of workloads from Public Cloud into Private or Colocated infrastructure. It is not a retreat. It is a sign of IT maturity.
Early Cloud adoption was often driven by speed and convenience. Today, priorities have shifted towards predictability, governance and long-term value. Many organisations are discovering that stable, long-running or data-heavy workloads can become disproportionately expensive in the Cloud over time. Variable billing, data egress charges, storage growth and operational sprawl can make forecasting difficult, especially at board level.
There is also a governance dimension. Regulatory expectations around data sovereignty, resilience, auditability and supply-chain risk are increasing. Knowing where data resides, who controls the underlying infrastructure and what your true resilience is, now matters far more than it did five years ago.
Where Colocation Fits Within a Hybrid IT Strategy
Colocation offers a practical middle ground.
You retain ownership and control of your servers, applications and data, but you place them in professionally managed Data Centres designed for resilience, security and uptime. This changes both the economics and the operational profile of your infrastructure.
Instead of unpredictable, consumption-based cloud billing, Colocation gives you fixed, contractually agreed costs for power, space and connectivity. You can budget more accurately and avoid the surprise of an invoice that looks fine one month and painful the next. From a technical perspective, dedicated infrastructure behaves predictably. Latency is consistent. Capacity planning is clearer. You can select and optimise hardware for your specific workloads, rather than paying a premium for general-purpose elasticity you may not need.
Did you know? CWCS provides Colocation from our ISO 27001-certified UK Data Centres in Nottingham, London and Manchester, with options ranging from single servers through to full racks. You keep control of your own infrastructure, while we provide the secure facilities, resilient power and connectivity, and 24/7 on-site support (including remote hands when you need it). If you’d like to explore the practical options, you can view our colocation services and rack choices on the CWCS website: https://www.cwcs.co.uk/colocation/
Workloads That Often Make Sense in Colo
If you are reviewing Colocation, or renewing an agreement, these are the questions I would push to the tThis is not about sweeping statements such as “cloud is bad”. It is about fit. In practice, Colocation is often a strong option for:
- Data-heavy applications where egress charges and storage growth drive cost
- Stable production workloads with predictable demand
- Systems with strict compliance, governance or data residency needs
- Environments where performance consistency matters more than elastic scaling
Colocation also pairs well with cloud. You can keep Cloud for burst capacity, dev and test, or SaaS integrations, while running core platforms in Colocation. For many organisations, this is a more balanced and commercially rational hybrid model.
Control Without Operational Burden
A common misconception is that leaving Cloud increases complexity. In reality, a well-run Colocation environment removes entire categories of operational responsibility.
Power, cooling, physical security and facilities management are delivered by specialist teams, 24/7. Your IT team focuses on services and outcomes, not on building infrastructure. If you need hands and eyes on site, you can use remote hands services rather than sending your own engineers out at 2am.
How to Evaluate Cloud to Colocation Properly
If you are considering repatriation, the quality of the decision depends on the quality of the assessment:
- What does the workload really cost today, including egress and operational overhead?
- What does it cost to run on dedicated infrastructure, including power and space?
- What are the compliance and audit requirements, and how will they be evidenced?
- What is the migration risk, and what sequencing reduces disruption?
This is where experience matters. Repatriation can be safe and low-risk, but only if it is planned, tested and executed in stages.
Making the move safely
The barrier to repatriation is rarely technology. It is risk perception.
Migration must be designed around continuity. Downtime, data integrity and security cannot be compromised. CWCS supports transitions through structured migration and onboarding programmes, staged cutovers, pre-testing, rollback planning and clear ownership of tasks and responsibilities. The goal is certainty rather than speed.
A More Grown-up Infrastructure Conversation
Public Cloud remains a powerful tool. It is just not the default answer for every workload.
Colocation is not about going backwards. It is about placing workloads where they make the most sense, based on evidence rather than habit. For many organisations, moving appropriate workloads from cloud to colocation delivers lower risk, clearer costs and greater confidence in their infrastructure decisions. And that is exactly what technology should provide.
