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2025 Cloud and FinOps Predictions - Part 2

As part of APMdigest's 2025 Predictions Series, industry experts offer predictions on how Cloud, FinOps and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2025. Part 2 covers repatriation and more.

 

REPATRIATION

Most new production workloads are born in the cloud, this will continue. However, in the coming year, there will be an increase in customers who modernized applications in the public cloud, repatriating this data due to cost control. The adoption of cloud infrastructure will continue to grow, but a percentage of organizations will bring services back down to a self-hosted data center.
Simon Taylor
CEO and Co-Founder, HYCU

With rising IT costs driven by increased license fees from major vendors and soaring hyperscaler bills, many organizations are facing budget crises. In 2025, we predict a shift as companies begin moving workloads back from the cloud to on-premises or colocations to reduce operational expenses.
Sascha Giese
Global Tech Evangelist, Observability, SolarWinds

Repatriation is accelerating, but the cloud might respond by 2025, likely through more competitive pricing, and also technical advancements offering greater flexibility and security. We're still heavily moving to the cloud, and repatriation might take a few years to slow down. 
William McKnight
Analyst, GigaOm

MULTI-CLOUD REPATRIATION

Multi-cloud repatriation will persist: Although there is still a movement of enterprises moving from private to public clouds, in 2025 we will see AI adoption drive a wave of simultaneous multi-cloud repatriation. Rising cloud costs, security concerns and resource constraints caused by AI adoption are the main drivers behind this trend and cloud repatriation will emerge as the strategic solution for controlling it.
Karthik Ranganathan
Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Yugabyte

CLOUD REPATRIATION WON'T DELIVER COST SAVINGS

Cloud repatriation won't be the key to cost savings (for most): As budget continues to be a key concern for organizations, one approach to cutting costs people are talking about, but not executing on is organizations moving their workloads from cloud to on-prem, however, that won't be feasible (or strategic) for most. It's true that certain organizations with predictable workloads might benefit from hybrid or on-prem solutions — like large-scale social media networks. However, for most companies, the time, money, resources, and overall complexity of full-scale cloud repatriation won't offset cost. Instead, they should look into implementing a targeted optimization approach — instead of abandoning their cloud infrastructure, they can optimize it for cost, performance, and scalability. This requires a mix of FinOps, leveraging the right tools, and continuous monitoring of infrastructure economics, but teams that lean into this approach will see meaningful cost savings without sacrificing the agility and scalability that drew them to cloud platforms in the first place.
Richard "Richi" Hartmann
Director of Community & Office of the CTO, Grafana Labs

SOVEREIGN CLOUD

All Hail The Sovereign Cloud: In 2025, we're going to see a real push towards sovereign and private clouds. We're already seeing the largest hyperscalers pouring billions of dollars into constructing data centers around the world to offer these capabilities. This rush to build capacity will take a while to come online, in the meantime, demand will skyrocket fueled by a wave of legislation coming predominantly from the EU. Those with flexible, scalable and elastic cloud infrastructure will be able to adopt sovereign or private approaches quickly. Those with monolithic, rigid infrastructure will be putting themselves behind the curve.
Kevin Cochrane
CMO, Vultr

INFRASTRUCTURE-AS-CODE

The adoption of infrastructure-as-code will make multi-cloud deployment strategies more sophisticated, enabling organizations to avoid vendor lock-in and optimize costs. Advanced tooling will remove provider differences, allowing seamless deployment and management across cloud platforms while maintaining consistent security and compliance controls.
Tristan Stahnke
Principal Application Security Consultant, GuidePoint Security

CLOUD-NATIVE ANALYTICS

Scalability and agility demands will push cloud-native analytics to the forefront: By 2025, cloud-native architectures will be the go-to choice for businesses looking to keep pace with the need for agility and scalability. As intelligence-supported decision-making takes center stage across industries, cloud-native analytics will lead the way. Companies are increasingly adopting multi-cloud strategies to maintain flexibility and avoid vendor lock-in, and analytics platforms will need to support seamless interoperability across different cloud providers. Users will look for hyperscale-neutral solutions that integrate effortlessly with major players like AWS, GCP, and Azure, while also handling AI/ML/Generative workloads with ease. Cloud-native is set to become the foundation for analytics in the next phase of business intelligence.
Trevor Schulze
Chief Digital & Information Officer, Alteryx

GREENOPS

GreenOps will grab a greater foothold: Statistics show that the public cloud now has a larger carbon footprint than even the airline industry, and a single public data center uses as much electricity as 50,000 homes. Amid new regulations, particularly in Europe, coupled with consumer pressure, we predict more interest in the concept of GreenOps. Put simply, GreenOps is the practice of minimizing a cloud environment's carbon footprint by efficiently using cloud resources. This can only be done with visibility into an organization's true cloud spend and a deeper understanding of how resources are allocated. Optimizing cloud use to reduce waste will be a key part of this puzzle, leading organizations and individuals to take a closer look at their data usage.
Bill Buckley
SVP of Engineering, CloudZero

Cloud providers will prioritize energy-efficient data centers and sustainable practices: The amount of electricity consumed to power today's data centers is incredible. A Gemini query (Google's generative AI tool) needs nearly 10 times as much electricity to process as a traditional Google search. Large tech brands including IBM, AWS and Google are already looking for ways to reduce the amount of electricity usage through energy-efficient hardware, and green energy sources. Power management software will also rise in popularity. Low-power processors, solid-state drives and energy-efficient cooling systems are cloud features you want to look for in 2025.
Sashank Purighalla
Founder and CEO, BOS Framework

Go to: 2025 Cloud and FinOps Predictions - Part 3

Hot Topics

The Latest

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...

An overwhelming majority of IT leaders (95%) believe the upcoming wave of AI-powered digital transformation is set to be the most impactful and intensive seen thus far, according to The Science of Productivity: AI, Adoption, And Employee Experience, a new report from Nexthink ...

Overall outage frequency and the general level of reported severity continue to decline, according to the Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute. However, cyber security incidents are on the rise and often have severe, lasting impacts ...

2025 Cloud and FinOps Predictions - Part 2

As part of APMdigest's 2025 Predictions Series, industry experts offer predictions on how Cloud, FinOps and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2025. Part 2 covers repatriation and more.

 

REPATRIATION

Most new production workloads are born in the cloud, this will continue. However, in the coming year, there will be an increase in customers who modernized applications in the public cloud, repatriating this data due to cost control. The adoption of cloud infrastructure will continue to grow, but a percentage of organizations will bring services back down to a self-hosted data center.
Simon Taylor
CEO and Co-Founder, HYCU

With rising IT costs driven by increased license fees from major vendors and soaring hyperscaler bills, many organizations are facing budget crises. In 2025, we predict a shift as companies begin moving workloads back from the cloud to on-premises or colocations to reduce operational expenses.
Sascha Giese
Global Tech Evangelist, Observability, SolarWinds

Repatriation is accelerating, but the cloud might respond by 2025, likely through more competitive pricing, and also technical advancements offering greater flexibility and security. We're still heavily moving to the cloud, and repatriation might take a few years to slow down. 
William McKnight
Analyst, GigaOm

MULTI-CLOUD REPATRIATION

Multi-cloud repatriation will persist: Although there is still a movement of enterprises moving from private to public clouds, in 2025 we will see AI adoption drive a wave of simultaneous multi-cloud repatriation. Rising cloud costs, security concerns and resource constraints caused by AI adoption are the main drivers behind this trend and cloud repatriation will emerge as the strategic solution for controlling it.
Karthik Ranganathan
Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Yugabyte

CLOUD REPATRIATION WON'T DELIVER COST SAVINGS

Cloud repatriation won't be the key to cost savings (for most): As budget continues to be a key concern for organizations, one approach to cutting costs people are talking about, but not executing on is organizations moving their workloads from cloud to on-prem, however, that won't be feasible (or strategic) for most. It's true that certain organizations with predictable workloads might benefit from hybrid or on-prem solutions — like large-scale social media networks. However, for most companies, the time, money, resources, and overall complexity of full-scale cloud repatriation won't offset cost. Instead, they should look into implementing a targeted optimization approach — instead of abandoning their cloud infrastructure, they can optimize it for cost, performance, and scalability. This requires a mix of FinOps, leveraging the right tools, and continuous monitoring of infrastructure economics, but teams that lean into this approach will see meaningful cost savings without sacrificing the agility and scalability that drew them to cloud platforms in the first place.
Richard "Richi" Hartmann
Director of Community & Office of the CTO, Grafana Labs

SOVEREIGN CLOUD

All Hail The Sovereign Cloud: In 2025, we're going to see a real push towards sovereign and private clouds. We're already seeing the largest hyperscalers pouring billions of dollars into constructing data centers around the world to offer these capabilities. This rush to build capacity will take a while to come online, in the meantime, demand will skyrocket fueled by a wave of legislation coming predominantly from the EU. Those with flexible, scalable and elastic cloud infrastructure will be able to adopt sovereign or private approaches quickly. Those with monolithic, rigid infrastructure will be putting themselves behind the curve.
Kevin Cochrane
CMO, Vultr

INFRASTRUCTURE-AS-CODE

The adoption of infrastructure-as-code will make multi-cloud deployment strategies more sophisticated, enabling organizations to avoid vendor lock-in and optimize costs. Advanced tooling will remove provider differences, allowing seamless deployment and management across cloud platforms while maintaining consistent security and compliance controls.
Tristan Stahnke
Principal Application Security Consultant, GuidePoint Security

CLOUD-NATIVE ANALYTICS

Scalability and agility demands will push cloud-native analytics to the forefront: By 2025, cloud-native architectures will be the go-to choice for businesses looking to keep pace with the need for agility and scalability. As intelligence-supported decision-making takes center stage across industries, cloud-native analytics will lead the way. Companies are increasingly adopting multi-cloud strategies to maintain flexibility and avoid vendor lock-in, and analytics platforms will need to support seamless interoperability across different cloud providers. Users will look for hyperscale-neutral solutions that integrate effortlessly with major players like AWS, GCP, and Azure, while also handling AI/ML/Generative workloads with ease. Cloud-native is set to become the foundation for analytics in the next phase of business intelligence.
Trevor Schulze
Chief Digital & Information Officer, Alteryx

GREENOPS

GreenOps will grab a greater foothold: Statistics show that the public cloud now has a larger carbon footprint than even the airline industry, and a single public data center uses as much electricity as 50,000 homes. Amid new regulations, particularly in Europe, coupled with consumer pressure, we predict more interest in the concept of GreenOps. Put simply, GreenOps is the practice of minimizing a cloud environment's carbon footprint by efficiently using cloud resources. This can only be done with visibility into an organization's true cloud spend and a deeper understanding of how resources are allocated. Optimizing cloud use to reduce waste will be a key part of this puzzle, leading organizations and individuals to take a closer look at their data usage.
Bill Buckley
SVP of Engineering, CloudZero

Cloud providers will prioritize energy-efficient data centers and sustainable practices: The amount of electricity consumed to power today's data centers is incredible. A Gemini query (Google's generative AI tool) needs nearly 10 times as much electricity to process as a traditional Google search. Large tech brands including IBM, AWS and Google are already looking for ways to reduce the amount of electricity usage through energy-efficient hardware, and green energy sources. Power management software will also rise in popularity. Low-power processors, solid-state drives and energy-efficient cooling systems are cloud features you want to look for in 2025.
Sashank Purighalla
Founder and CEO, BOS Framework

Go to: 2025 Cloud and FinOps Predictions - Part 3

Hot Topics

The Latest

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...

An overwhelming majority of IT leaders (95%) believe the upcoming wave of AI-powered digital transformation is set to be the most impactful and intensive seen thus far, according to The Science of Productivity: AI, Adoption, And Employee Experience, a new report from Nexthink ...

Overall outage frequency and the general level of reported severity continue to decline, according to the Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute. However, cyber security incidents are on the rise and often have severe, lasting impacts ...