How cloud exit can be turned into strategic advantage [Q&A]

Increasingly businesses are considering moving workloads off large public clouds to on premises or vendor neutral platforms.

We spoke to Ignacio M. Llorente, the CEO of OpenNebula Systems, to discuss why cloud exit can offer a chance to modernize and future-proof infrastructure with systems designed for long term efficiency, flexibility and control.

BN: What are the critical steps organizations must take to ensure their data and application state are truly portable across different infrastructure environments?

IML: True portability begins with stepping away from tight dependencies at the infrastructure level. If applications rely too heavily on a specific vendor’s stack, moving them anywhere else becomes a challenge. The safest approach is to work with open standards, familiar APIs, and tooling that behaves the same whether you’re running on-premises or in the cloud.

In our case, OpenNebula helps by separating the workload from the underlying platform. Virtual machines, containers, and even full clusters can be shifted or replicated across different environments without having to redesign them. The idea is simple: keep the application and its state detached from the hardware or cloud provider underneath, so teams decide where to place their workloads — not the vendor.

BN: How can migrating off a public cloud or a legacy platform address technical debt and improve core system maintainability and resilience?

IML: Many organizations discover that technical debt accumulates when they depend too heavily on proprietary services or aging virtualization stacks. Moving to a vendor-neutral platform gives them a chance to consolidate tooling, modernize automation, and standardize their operating model.

Organizations should seek out solutions that provide a unified way of managing compute, storage, and networking across different footprints.

BN: When can migration lead to improved application performance and reduced latency for critical users?

IML: You usually see a real boost in performance when workloads run closer to where the data is produced or where the users actually are. Public clouds can offer enormous capacity, but the physical distance between their regions and the people or systems consuming the service can add noticeable latency.

Workloads need to be placed exactly where they make the most sense. Part of the infrastructure can remain in a local data center or at the edge, and organizations can still tap into public clouds whenever extra capacity is needed. That flexibility allows teams to fine-tune placement. The most demanding applications can be positioned close to the users who rely on them, while other workloads can be pushed out to larger cloud regions. It’s a level of control and balance that’s hard to achieve when everything is tied to a single provider.

BN: Is there a significant culture shift needed to go from managing cloud resources to owning and optimizing infrastructure?

IML: There is a change involved, but it’s usually more about shifting the way people think than about retraining everyone. When teams step away from a fully managed public cloud, they have to take back some of the operational tasks that were previously handled for them – things like capacity planning, lifecycle operations, and keeping an eye on performance.

Organizations should seek out platforms that automate a large part of this work and provide a cloud-like experience even when running on their own hardware. Instead of falling back into the old data-center mindset, organizations should move into a genuine hybrid approach where they hold onto the flexibility of the cloud while running infrastructure that remains entirely under their control.

BN: Which metrics should be used to judge the lasting success of a major platform migration?

IML: People often focus on cost savings first, but that’s really just one part of the story. When a migration goes well, you usually see broader improvements: smoother operations, quicker response times for critical applications, stronger resilience, and a noticeable step away from relying on a single vendor.

Another good sign is how quickly teams can get things done once the transition is complete, such as provisioning new resources, launching services, or scaling workloads. When those changes start showing up, you know the move has paid off in a lasting way, not just as a short-term cost fix.

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