By Steve Sarsfield, Developer Advocate
Many IT teams are considering moving their analytical workloads back on premises to manage costs and performance. You may be part of the growing faction disappointed by the cloud’s TCO. Your team can either accept higher costs or reevaluate workloads for a better deployment fit. Let’s start with a few basic questions.
Is on prem more cost-effective?
Depending on the workload, on-premises deployment can be more cost-effective and customizable than the public cloud. The big break seems to be larger workloads. While sub-10 TB workloads make economic sense for the public cloud, larger workloads will begin to cause a non-linear increase in costs, so 20 TB may cost you more than double the amount you were paying for 10 TB. Yet many companies are considering the cost escalation of 200 TB, 500 TB, or petabytes. The public cloud looks a lot less cost-effective in larger data scenarios.
Of course, other metrics, such as the number of queries, acceptable analytical delivery times (SLAs), types of analysis, and concurrency, also impact costs.
Why on prem, Why now?
Looking at on prem, two major innovations have inspired many to look at repatriation. First, processors (CPUs) continue to get more cores, more powerful, and more energy efficient while cloud vendors are a little slow leveraging them. Second, solid-state drives (SSDs) continue to get more performant, especially when accessed directly without layers of interference from the operating system.
While many cloud vendors tout the benefits of separating compute and storage, on prem has been considering making them one. The two hardware innovations let you analyze more data faster. Instead of sipping data through a straw, the innovations give instantaneous access between the storage and processing layers. The performance boost is unique to on prem, allowing you to use fewer servers for equivalent analytical workloads.
When it’s time to bring your analytical workload back down to earth rather than the clouds, let’s consider some of the steps you should take to get it done.
Step 1: Business and Financial Strategy
Every good project needs a plan. Before diving into the technical details of cloud repatriation, determine why from both business and cost perspectives. What makes the move appealing from the business perspective? My advice here is to focus on costs and compliance to make a business case that you can use to remind any naysayers.
- Compare the total cost of ownership (TCO) for on-prem hardware, software licenses, ongoing maintenance, and staffing vs. the current or projected cloud expenditures.
- Look ahead and plan for two to five years. Make an educated guess about what data volumes will be in your future and how your team will handle them.
- Make sure that repatriation fits the company’s IT and business strategies.
- Get budget approval for a proof of concept or a move toward repatriation.
I always say that business approval can be found in three places: 1) Does it help the company make more revenue with new analysis? 2) Does it make handling data more efficient, or 3) Can it help with compliance? Revenue, efficiency, and compliance are the pillars of your business plan.
Where Ocient Comes In: The Ocient Customer Solutions and Workload Services team looks at how on prem can add value to your organization across the enterprise. Then, taking a business-led approach, we help arm you with a holistic but practical and executable strategy that puts your business and customers’ needs first. We’ll work with you to understand your business strategy and its impact on revenue, operational efficiency, and compliance issues. Deploy Ocient on your hardware and in your secure environment, then tap into the deep experience of Ocient Management Services to set up, manage, and monitor your Ocient solution.
Step 2: Analytical Workload Assessment
Assessing your analytical workloads is essential before repatriating from the cloud. During this step, focus on the data types you plan to analyze, the queries you’ll run, and how to structure and optimize the data to ensure efficient performance on prem.
- Data Types: Identify the range of data types you’ll handle. Strings are handled differently than numbers. Numbers should be handled differently than UUIDs. All are indexed and optimized in different ways.
- Queries: Map out your queries to understand workload patterns, concurrency requirements, and response-time expectations.
- Optimization: Explore data partitioning and secondary indexing strategies to balance speed and cost efficiency.
Where Ocient Comes In: Ocient helps you analyze and refine your on-prem workloads, ensuring that data types, query patterns, and system configurations align with your business objectives. Our experts collaborate with your team to design and implement best-fit architectures, then provide ongoing support through Ocient Management Services to keep your analytical environment running at peak efficiency.
Step 3: Data & Migration Complexity
Data movement can be one of the most challenging aspects of repatriation, but it doesn’t have to be painful. Your cloud environment may be using multiple solutions for moving data. Many companies use the AWS cloud, for example, a combination of AWS Kinesis, Apache Arrow, or Spark for data processing with Redshift for OLAP queries.
Data lifecycle management is all about mapping data from ingestion and transformation to archiving or retirement, categorizing, setting retention policies, and promoting ongoing maintenance for efficient data repositories.
Data lifecycle management means giving your data a defined “start-to-finish” roadmap—covering everything from how it’s ingested and transformed to when (and how) it’s eventually archived or retired. It’s important to categorize data based on sensitivity and usage patterns and then create appropriate retention policies and storage tiers. Beyond compliance, this proactive approach ensures you’re not hanging onto stale information while retaining critical data for analytics, auditing, or future innovation. Treating data lifecycle management as an ongoing practice rather than a one-time effort, you’ll maintain cleaner, more cost-effective data repositories in the long run.
Where Ocient Comes In: Modern analytical platforms like Ocient can unify orchestration, ETL/ELT, analytics, and more in a unified platform. This frees you from using so many solutions to accomplish proper data management.
Step 4: Understanding Security & Compliance Requirements
Moving data on prem does not automatically solve security and compliance—it just changes who is directly responsible. You’ll need to strengthen your access controls and identity management, protecting your data from internal and external threats. At the same time, be sure your on-prem setup complies with any regulations you must adhere to. There are industry-specific ones like GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, or PCI.
Security and compliance aren’t a “check it off once and forget about it” task, especially when bringing analytics on prem. They start with clearly documenting the regulatory mandates you must meet, then layering on controls for both physical and digital access. Each safeguard, from data encryption and network segmentation to identity management, must be regularly tested and updated.
Where Ocient Comes In: We can help ensure strong role-based access, identity management, and threat detection measures. We’ll also work with you to validate that your on-prem setup meets or exceeds regulations and industry-specific mandates.
Step 5: Hardware Procurement and Installation
If you know the workload requirements and the business goals, it’s time to secure and install the on-prem hardware. To determine how much hardware to purchase, IT teams could assess the workload’s computing, storage, and network requirements based on the new technology and projected growth.
On-prem servers can be highly capable but may require more upfront capacity planning than cloud environments. As you make the switch, evaluate needs, keeping in mind that modern on prem can take advantage of more CPU cores and NVMe storage for improved performance.
Where Ocient Comes in: Some companies have extra capacity in their data centers that Ocient can tap into. If not, we’ll help you pick the most energy-efficient servers that can grow to meet your workloads. If you decide on a managed service from Ocient, installation and configuration of new Ocient nodes are included.
Step 6: Installation, Migration Timeline & Rollback Plan
A well-orchestrated timeline is the backbone of any successful repatriation. Start by mapping out each stage—from initial data transfer and environment validation to performance tuning and final cutover—with clear milestones and checkpoints. Just as critical is your rollback plan: if major hiccups arise, you need the option to quickly revert to cloud operations without incurring massive downtime. Schedule go-live windows that won’t catch your business off guard and keep stakeholders informed at every turn.
Where Ocient Comes In: We can help you craft a phased migration plan tailored to your organization’s needs. We’ll define success metrics, establish contingency protocols, and work with you to build a reliable rollback strategy so you can shift workloads with confidence, knowing there’s a safety net if anything goes wrong.
Step 7: Ongoing Maintenance & Performance Tuning
Once your analytics workloads land on-prem, ongoing maintenance becomes essential to keep everything running like clockwork. This step involves a disciplined routine for patching, updating, and monitoring—so performance dips or security gaps never blindside you. It also means planning for hardware refreshes, managing software license renewals, handling capacity expansions, and tackling unexpected incidents head-on. Here are a few key considerations:
- Baseline Metrics: Collect and analyze real usage data from your cloud environment to guide on-prem capacity planning.
- Latency Sensitivity: Some analytics tasks can be CPU intensive and demand low-latency. Invest in the right network design and high-speed storage solutions.
- Performance Tuning: Continuously monitor and optimize on-prem infrastructure as you would in the cloud.
- Skill Sets: Make sure your team has—or can develop—the expertise to handle on-prem hardware, firmware updates, and deeper configuration tasks.
- Processes & Governance: Establish procedures for provisioning resources, decommissioning hardware, incident resolution, and governance to maintain a stable, reliable environment.
Where Ocient Comes In: With Ocient’s managed service option, we’ll keep your Ocient environment up to date—handling node upgrades, making configuration changes, and setting up alerts for proactive monitoring. We’ll also work with you to fine-tune system performance and ensure any adjustments align with your evolving business and data needs.
Step 8: Disaster Recovery & High Availability
Planning for the worst, most commonly hardware failures, ensures you stay operational. This step focuses on laying the groundwork for disaster recovery (DR) and high availability (HA) strategies:
- Backup & Restore: Develop thorough backup procedures and schedule regular test runs. For extra protection, consider offline or geographically distributed backups.
- HA Strategy: Features like clustering, load balancing, and redundant hardware minimize downtime so that one failure won’t take down your entire analytical environment.
- DR Strategy: Define acceptable RPO (recovery point objective) and RTO (recovery time objective), and remember that on-prem DR isn’t necessarily the same as in the cloud. You may need new approaches or technologies to meet these metrics.
Where Ocient Comes In: We’ll help you design and implement a disaster recovery plan tailored to your Ocient deployment, from data replication to failover orchestration. With the right mix of infrastructure resilience and software tooling, you’ll be prepared to bounce back quickly—no matter what comes your way.
Helping Companies Rethink the Cloud
I mentioned in the opening paragraphs that new technologies are helping many companies rethink their cloud-only strategies. We at Ocient agree.
Ocient’s recent collaboration with AMD shows how the latest processors drive massive-scale data processing and analytics to new heights. Increased core counts in AMD EPYC processors help Ocient boost the real-time analytics platform. Ocient takes full advantage of AMD’s processors, or Intel’s processors and high-speed analytics.
Our Compute Adjacent Storage Architecture®(CASA) is pivotal. By tightly integrating compute and NVMe storage in a single, HPC-inspired system, CASA ensures that queries are processed with maximum concurrency across all available cores—no CPU cycles go to waste. The architecture coordinates every layer of the platform (from data ingestion to query execution and storage management) so that resources can dynamically scale and adapt based on workload demands.
Our unified platform might also help you minimize the number of software products you need. Ocient offers a unified analytics platform designed for data workloads, enabling enterprises to ingest, store, analyze, and act on massive datasets—all in one place. Unlike fragmented solutions requiring multiple data movement and transformation tools, Ocient’s approach consolidates these capabilities into a single, high-performance platform.
Ocient’s Managed Services offering enables enterprises to offload the operational complexity of managing hyperscale analytics workloads, ensuring peak performance, security, and cost efficiency without the burden of in-house management. With 24/7 monitoring, proactive support, and continuous performance tuning, Ocient optimizes query execution, dynamically allocates resources, and applies security updates seamlessly. This allows organizations to focus on deriving insights from their data rather than maintaining infrastructure.
By providing security and compliance management, hybrid and on-prem support, and expert strategic guidance, Ocient ensures that enterprises maximize ROI while maintaining full control over their data.
Learn more specifics about Ocient for On Premises here.