The decision to keep a workload on premises or move it to the cloud is complex and requires a deep understanding of your data center infrastructure and application design. If you make this decision blindly, it can lower performance or create additional expenses. It could also force you to move workloads from the public cloud back in-house — a trend known as unclouding.

In the past few years, containers and microservices trends have driven IT departments to break down applications into smaller components and make infrastructures more resilient. Traditionally, applications were a collection of components that sat in a machine, but applications in more modern infrastructures sit within a group of machines. This creates new traffic patterns and dependencies within the system and presents different factors that determine where that application or workload should run.

It’s easy for IT to overlook those new factors and impulsively jump on the cloud bandwagon, which touts scalability, high availability and a more hands-off approach, but the cloud isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. As many companies discover that the public cloud isn’t the best fit for every workload, the trend of reverse migration, or unclouding, has emerged. Nearly 40% of organizations with public cloud experience have migrated systems from the cloud to on premises, according to a Datalink survey.

Unclouding occurs for a variety of reasons — primarily to save money or gain a greater level of control — but it’s often due to a lack of understanding. Only 31% of participants in the Datalink survey assessed apps to determine whether they were a good candidate for cloud. Ask the following five questions during your initial cloud vs. on premises debate to prevent the hassle of reverse migration.