This month we have a very interesting invitation from Koen Verbeeck. He has hosted once before, and agreed to help me out this month by tackling another topic. We’ve shared a few beers in the EU, though not in some time, so I hopefully will get the chance to buy him a pint and thank him for this month’s invite.
He was inspired by another friend, Alexander Avidsson, who wrote about skills and the cloud, but with an interesting take. This month’s invite is about moving back on-premises from the cloud, which is something I’ve had a few customers do, or start doing. Nothing is quick when migrating systems, either to or from the cloud.
Here’s my take.
How Easy Is It To Un-Migrate?
I decided on a fun title here, since so many people talk about migrating to the cloud. Is going back on-premises an un-migration? Or a re-migration? Just a migration? I won’t worry about the semantics.
I work with a lot of different customers at Redgate Software. Whether they are discussing development topics (Prompt/Toolbelt), deployment issues (Flyway), production stuff (Monitor) or compliance (all of the above + TDM), I find that most of them are still rooted in an on-premises mindset. Even when they’ve migrated to the cloud, it’s often lift-and-shift, with VMs running in AWS/Azure/GCP. In that sense, they still tend to manage things in an on-premises way.
They’re more comfortable with those skills and more confused by cloud auth systems, still. In 2026.
I think that’s still the norm and it’s easy to think that most people work in the cloud all the time. Some do, and I think most people have some familiarity with one of the major cloud systems, but I would expect that lots of people would love to come back on-premises.
Is it easy? No. It’s another migration, and while you might find it easy to re-provision hardware (whether purchased or rented from another provider like Rackspace) there are still major data movement challenges in the db world. How do I sync systems? Can I get log backups? What type of quiescing and cutover is there?
The tech stuff, matching versions, etc. is likely easy. After all, most of us don’t use the latest and greatest functions from SQL Server, so moving back to on-premises likely just works. If you are in the IaaS world, this is simple, other than the latency of copying data down (and explaining the egress charges).
I actually think customers might gain some efficiencies from moving systems with known workloads and costs back on-premises. Especially those that create lots of tickets for DBAs or developers. Any time spent moving back will come back in the skills that so many have with on-premises systems.
The one downside I think might cause some issues is HA. It’s easy in the cloud, and hard on-premises. Those are skills that some people likely need to brush up on if they don’t have a significant HA footprint with VMs.