What is geopatriation? And should we geopatriate?

Geopatriation is the the relocation of workloads and applications from global cloud hyperscalers to regional or national alternatives due to geopolitical uncertainty

Unless you are living on another planet, far away from Earth, you may have realized several trends in the latest years. One of this is the affirmation of the Cloud services, and in particular of the so-called hyperscalers, Cloud providers that represents a significant market share. Just the first three, Amazon AWS, Windows Azure and Google GCP, have more than 60% of the market.

Another trend is the geopolitical instability, just to put it blandly. One of the consequences of this… new and challenging environment, there is the realization that delegating entire services and technological stacks to a few providers can lead to problematic situations.

We have seen recently that Amazon data centers have been targeted during the retaliation actions in the Middle East. This should not surprise anybody. We have seen the concentration of data and infrastructure in the hands of a few hyperscalers.

On one side, this creates an evident vulnerability. Concentrating so many critical infrastructures in a few data centers is not so different from drawing a huge red target.

On the other side, the concentration of many critical services in the hands of a few companies, subject to the regulation of countries that could require to access data, could be an evident inconvenience for another country. Especially if politics of the hyperscaler country starts to be unpredictable.

Cloud repatriation

Cloud repatriation is another term that could be called here. But its context is different. Cloud repatriation is the process of migrating applications from public clouds back to your own infrastructure. That is something that could be done to achieve a bigger control on the infrastrucutre, or following the realization the company workload does not fit well in a public cloud. Or does not fit all with the cloud model.

Public cloud usage can be very expensive, and may not be the best model to handle the highly regulated nature of certain kinds of data, especially when critical data have to be stored or processed.

These are situations in which an organization can decide to repatriate at leat part of its services.

Geopatriation

And then there is Geopatriation. This term has been coined by Gartner® in the 2025, in the How to Protect Geopolitically Risky Cloud Workloads research.

Geopatriation, the relocation of workloads and applications from global cloud hyperscalers to regional or national alternatives due to geopolitical uncertainty, refers to the repatriation efforts that result from specific geographic or territorial requirements, limitations, or risks for cloud infrastructure and data storage, processing, or other services.

Geopatriation seeks to control and own cloud infrastructure that is located in a specific territory under clear legal jurisdiction.

There are essentially five options for protecting cloud workflows that face geopolitical risks:

Reinforcement: keep using hyperscaler services, but reinforcing your cloud environment.

Redeployment: keep using hyperscaler, but redeploy most at-risk workloads to a different cloud setup.

Removal: removing at-risk workloads from the hyperscaler, redeploying everything to a local cloud provider.

Repatriation: you move all of your workloads to an on-premises solution.

Accepting: no change is made.

Removal and repatriation are what we can define geopatriation.

Growing interest, and existing doubts

Due to conflicts, changes in internationa trade ruls, political tensions, the landscape is more uncertain. And this uncertainty raises serious questions for organizations using cloud services to handle critical services.

In 2026, EU Commission will propose the Cloud and AI Development Act, with the aim to at least triple the EU’s data centre capacity within the next 5 to 7 years and fully meet the needs of EU businesses and public administrations by 2035. And to strengthen Europe’s digital sovereignty in the cloud sector, the Act will work in tandem with a proposed single EU-wide cloud policy for public administrations and public procurement.

At the same time, one the main question will have to be replied is related to the ability of local providers to handle the same load, and the same kind of services, handled by the hyperscalers.

Because this is another issue coming from their adoption. The dependance on third party services, and on an environment that is studied to make relatively easy to enter, but that creates dependencies that make exiting quite hard.

In some cases, for example when the costs are high and the workloads are not elastic, so do not justify the cloud model, the reply should be quite simple, there are not good reason to remains. And this includes also services that are subject to a strict regulation, that makes remaining counterintuitive.

But, at the same time, there is also another case that should be really evaluated. That is related to country critical services. In this case, it is hard to see the convenience to be depandant on this model, and the cost for moving out is expected to be easily counterbalanced by reduced dependency on entities that may not be a guarantee any more.