The Great Cloud Exodus: Part VII

Published by

WINMAG Pro Editorial Team

Tue, 06 January 2026, 15:55

Read time: 4 min 0 sec

For decades, the direction of the IT sector was one-way traffic. The signs all pointed in the same direction: to the cloud. It was an era marked by an almost religious belief in the promises of American tech giants. 'Cloud First' was not just a policy intention; it was a mantra that resonated in boardrooms of multinationals, in policy departments of the national government, and in startup hubs from Amsterdam to Eindhoven. Now a shift is taking place. In this series, Michel Heinst examines this 'Cloud Exodus'. Today Part VII: The Risks of Leaving the Cloud.

Text: Michel Heinst, CEO and owner Tech Outlet Ltd

The promise was tempting in its simplicity: no more own servers, no worries about updates or security patches, and infinite scalability available at the push of a button. Anyone investing in their own 'hardware' in 2015 was met with pitying looks.

However, by 2025 the atmosphere has radically changed. The honeymoon phase with the hyperscalers - Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud - is definitively over. What began as a flirtation with flexibility and modernization has turned into a stifling marriage for many Dutch organizations, characterized by vendor lock-in, unpredictable cost explosions, and a fundamental lack of control over their own data.

IDC predicts that by 2026 as much as 65% of enterprises will switch to a hybrid model, where data processing and AI tasks are pulled back to the edge or on-premise environments. McKinsey notes a clear trend reversal: CIOs in Europe are shifting their focus from pure cloud adoption to digital sovereignty and cost control.

This report analyzes not only the numbers but also the human and organizational stories behind this movement. Why does a successful SaaS entrepreneur choose to leave the cloud for dedicated servers? Why does the Dutch government shudder at the thought of American data seizures? And is it technically and financially feasible to regain control?

This article is part of a series. The previous part, EU Regulations and Gaia-X, went online last Tuesday. The complete series can be viewed here.

The Great Cloud Exodus, Part VII: Risks of Leaving the Cloud

We have thoroughly discussed the benefits of leaving the cloud, but honesty also requires mentioning: it is not without challenges.

Initial Time Investment

Migrating takes time. An entrepreneur spent significantly more time on infrastructure during the migration to Kubernetes and Docker at the beginning of 2024. With AI assistance and experience, this returned to normal levels.

Technical Knowledge

When leaving the cloud, you need to have or hire more technical knowledge. Cloud providers offer managed services for databases, caching, and monitoring. You now have to set this up yourself.

Some Services Remain Challenging

Some services remain difficult to make cloud-independent. Object storage for example: alternatives like Cloudflare R2 or Wasabi are vendor-specific but cheaper than AWS S3. Minio is open-source and S3-compatible, but requires expertise.

For authentication, Keycloak is the open-source alternative to AWS Cognito, but the UX may fall short here. For CDN and DDoS, CloudFlare fills this gap, but pure open-source alternatives are lacking.

The Best of Both Worlds

The practical route is often hybrid. Generic or publicly secure tasks can safely remain in the cloud, but confidential documents are best kept in local infrastructure. If you do not have the capacity to keep all confidential information in-house, aim for private endpoints in EU data centers.

Cloud Exodus in Practice

We now have all the pros and cons lined up and the solutions ready for you. Now the question remains: how does it work in practice? A number of organizations have gone before you. We will discuss these next week in the eighth part of 'The Great Cloud Exodus': Success Stories from Europe.

This is the seventh part of the series 'The Great Cloud Exodus', in collaboration with Michel Heinst from Tech Outlet. The eighth part of the series will be published next week.

About TechOutlet.eu

TechOutlet.eu has been a specialist in enterprise IT hardware for the Benelux since 2014. They supply EOL (End-of-Life) and new servers, workstations, and laptops from brands like HP, Dell, and Lenovo to SMEs, government, and healthcare.

The focus is on: