As Cloud Customers Whine About AWS Bills, Cisco Looks to Woo Them Back to Data Centers

Cloud computing providers such as Amazon Web Services have become widely accepted by businesses that don’t want to manage their own data centers, but some AWS customers continue to grumble about the high costs of the cloud. Even the most sophisticated tech companies have stumbled in managing those expenses.

Seeking to capitalize on that frustration, Cisco Systems, the leading seller of hardware that shuttles data within and between data centers, has been developing a subscription service to help companies move, or repatriate, their computing tasks from AWS to private data centers, according to two people with direct knowledge of the project. For more than a year, Cisco has been working on an as-yet-unannounced service that would also manage hardware and software within private data centers for customers who can’t or don’t want to do so on their own. It’s unclear when or whether Cisco will launch the service, which is still in an early stage of development, but longtime senior executives at the company have been managing the effort, known as Cloud Stack.

Internally, Cloud Stack is viewed as a response to companies that have seen surprisingly large bills after moving applications and computing jobs to cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. During the pandemic, many companies stepped up their usage of cloud services in order to provide computing services to their remote workers without realizing the full cost they would incur, said two consultants who help Fortune 500 firms with cloud projects.