Has there been any actual shift from cloud to on prem?

I work in technology consulting (I won’t dox myself, but it’s a firm you’ve heard of), and our data center strategy team is swamped with presales opportunities and inquiries right now. The biggest catalyst? Uncertainty around cloud provider economics. There's growing skepticism that AWS, Google, Microsoft, and others can sustain their current cost structures—especially if global trade tensions lead to tariffed pricing on hardware or stricter regulations on data sovereignty and energy usage. What I'm seeing in the field is a pattern of hybrid rationalization: if a company can outsource a business process to a SaaS provider (think: Workday, Salesforce, etc.), they will. But when it comes to core, line-of-business applications—especially those with complex integrations or performance demands—they’re bringing them back on-prem. A recent example: a small university I worked with is doing exactly this. Their student information system, which is mission-critical, runs on self-hosted servers in their own facility. Meanwhile, less sensitive workloads are handled via SaaS subscriptions. After 15 years of cloud enthusiasm, businesses are starting to realize that the cloud can sometimes be the *most* expensive option—especially at scale, and especially when egress, overprovisioning, and long-term licensing costs are factored in. The early cloud adoption wave was often driven by executive-level vision: the belief that short-term pain would yield long-term agility and cost savings. But many of those promised benefits haven’t fully materialized. Now, post-COVID, there’s breathing room. The dust has settled, priorities have shifted, and organizations are revisiting IT strategies that were on pause. There's a renewed appetite for rebalancing workloads, modernizing infrastructure, and, yes—pulling back from the cloud where it makes financial or operational sense. The reality is that the cost curves haven’t normalized, and many companies are looking to regain control. **TL/DR: hybrid, multi-cloud, and targeted repatriation are definitely on the rise**