The Enterprise Exodus
When companies spending $100M+ on cloud infrastructure start leaving, it signals a fundamental shift. These aren't startups making rash decisions—these are Fortune 500 enterprises with armies of analysts who've done the math.
GEICO
Fortune 500 • Insurance • $35B Revenue
The Challenge
GEICO's cloud transformation began in 2018 with a promise of agility. By 2021, monthly bills exceeded $40M. The complexity of thousands of microservices created a management nightmare, while security concerns in a regulated industry added friction.
The Pivot
In 2022, facing costs 2.5x higher than projected, GEICO pivoted. They began repatriating workloads to a private OpenStack cloud. The result was a 65% reduction in infrastructure spend and a massive simplification of their architecture.
Akamai
CDN Leader • $3.5B Rev
Akamai was spending $100M+ annually on AWS while owning 350,000 servers globally. The irony of funding a competitor (Amazon) to host their own management plane was too much.
Result: They moved compute workloads to their own edge network, saving ~$100M annually and regaining architectural independence.
Major US Bank
Top 10 • $2T Assets
After a $500M cloud migration, regulators raised concerns about data sovereignty. The cost of compliance in the public cloud was prohibitive.
Result: A hybrid repatriation. Core banking systems returned to private data centers for compliance, achieving 40% cost reduction and satisfying regulators.
The New Enterprise Playbook
Workload Analysis
Stop "lifting and shifting." Identify which workloads actually need elasticity vs. those that are stable.
Hybrid by Design
Keep dev/test and burst capacity in the cloud. Run steady-state production on bare metal.
Platform Engineering
Invest in internal platforms (Kubernetes on bare metal) to give developers a cloud-like experience without the cloud tax.