Yet I still see strategies where “move everything out” becomes the default architecture decision.
A few years ago, I reviewed a migration plan where a GCC wanted to exit its primary datacenter within 9 months. The spreadsheet looked clean. The PowerPoint looked sharper. But nobody had modeled east-west traffic dependencies between legacy apps and backend databases.
The result? Interconnect costs tripled. Latency crept in. And the supposed savings disappeared before year two.
Hybrid maturity is not about splitting workloads 50-50 between cloud and on-prem. It’s about knowing why something stays, why something moves, and what breaks if you get it wrong.
In real production environments, uptime is not a slogan. It’s an SLA tied to revenue, regulatory exposure, and brand trust.
One lesson I learned managing live estates: capacity planning must include failure scenarios, not just growth projections. Redundancy design must assume imperfect humans, not perfect systems.
Modernization is necessary. Blind acceleration is dangerous.
For Datacenter Engineering Heads:
Are you exiting your datacenter because it’s strategic — or because it sounds progressive?