Free report·
Cloud Repatriation: Not the Story We've Been Told
Sovereignty, Scale, and What's Actually Driving Infrastructure Decisions
For organisations that made changes to their cloud infrastructure over the last year, 31% of developers moved services from on-premise to public cloud, compared to 28% and 24% who moved from public cloud to private cloud and on-premise infrastructure, respectively.
The 31st edition of SlashData's Developer Nation survey tests the widely repeated claim that organisations are repatriating workloads away from public cloud in response to sovereignty concerns. Drawing on more than 3,000 cloud developers asked what they have actually done to their infrastructure in the last 12 months and plan to do over the next 24, the report finds movement in multiple directions at once rather than a one-way retreat. It examines the supposed transatlantic divide, showing that Western European and North American developers report broadly similar migration patterns, and segments results by organisational size and industry vertical. Sovereignty concern is shown to be real but concentrated: it scales with organisational size and surfaces most strongly in regulated, data-sensitive industries. For most developers, cost, performance, security and control dominate infrastructure decisions far more than geopolitics. The report concludes that the repatriation narrative is overstated as an industry-wide phenomenon under the regulatory climate of 2026.
Key findings
- For organisations that have made changes to their cloud infrastructure over the last year, 31% of developers state they moved services from on-premise to public cloud, compared to 28% and 24% who moved from public cloud to private cloud and on-premise infrastructure, respectively.
- The North American-European divide is less severe in reality than the media presents, with similar or comparable infrastructure movements over the last year.
- Larger organisations and those handling sensitive or highly-regulated data are the most likely to express concerns around sovereignty, motivating their decisions to explore moving away from public cloud or towards hybrid cloud.
- While sovereignity is important to many developers and organsiations, performance and operational concerns still dominate cloud infrastructure decision-making.
Questions this report answers
Are developers actually repatriating workloads away from public cloud?
Movement is happening in multiple directions simultaneously: 31% of developers said their organisation moved workloads from on-premises to public cloud, while 28% moved from public cloud to private cloud and 24% moved to on-premises infrastructure.
Is there a real transatlantic divide in cloud strategy?
No. Western European and North American developers report broadly similar rates of public-to-private cloud migration (28% vs 31%), public-to-on-premises migration (23% vs 23%), and on-premises-to-public cloud migration (27% vs 33%).
Who is most concerned about data sovereignty?
Data sovereignty and regulatory compliance showed a clear organisational gradient, cited by 10% of small business developers, 18% of those at medium-sized organisations, and 21% at large enterprises.
What actually drives developers to move workloads off public cloud?
Across almost every industry vertical the dominant motivation is security, cited by between 40% and 43% of developers in financial services, software, data and analytics, telecoms, and AI.
Which sectors are most motivated by sovereignty concerns?
Sovereignty-based motivation is most concentrated among developers in business consulting and legal services (24%), followed by data analytics and business intelligence (19%).
Do government and defence organisations prioritise sovereignty?
No. Government and defence developers are among the least likely to cite data sovereignty as a motivation for moving off the cloud (13%); decisions are shaped more by procurement policy and budget constraints.
Who it's for
- Cloud vendors and hyperscalers positioning against the repatriation narrative
- Infrastructure and platform leads benchmarking their migration strategy
- Analysts and strategists tracking cloud sovereignty and regulatory trends