Brazil firms rethink cloud costs and architecture

Why Are Companies Pulling Back from the Cloud?

The pandemic triggered a hardware shortage that pushed businesses to migrate workloads to public cloud at breakneck speed. Costs spiraled far beyond budget forecasts, and now companies are reassessing both spending and digital architecture.

What Is Driving the Return to Physical Infrastructure?

Eduardo Carvalho, president of Equinix Latin America, says unchecked cloud contracts blew up budgets, forcing many companies to reverse course. Currency fluctuations made dollar-denominated cloud bills even more painful, while physical colocation data centers offer greater financial predictability. "Our data centers are full," Carvalho notes. Ascenty has also seen growing demand for colocation, with its solutions architecture manager Wladimir da Silva Junior describing cloud migration as continuing but becoming "more selective and strategic."

What Is the Multicloud Strategy and Why Does It Matter?

Companies are increasingly adopting multicloud strategies — distributing workloads across several providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google, Huawei, Oracle, and IBM — to drive down costs through competition and avoid vendor lock-in. Brazil's federal IT company Serpro launched its private cloud journey in 2014 and has operated a full multicloud model for the past five years. "At every new contract, providers compete against each other and costs fall," says Welsinner Brito, Serpro's corporate architecture superintendent.

From Cloud-First to Cloud-Smart: What Does That Mean?

The industry is entering a "cloud smart" era, replacing the blanket "cloud first" mandate with deliberate choices between public and private cloud depending on regulation and workload sensitivity. Brazil's Receita Federal (tax authority) required that the country's tax reform run on Serpro's sovereign private cloud, illustrating how legislation now shapes infrastructure decisions.

How Is FinOps Helping Control AI-Related Cloud Costs?

Artificial intelligence is emerging as the next cost explosion risk. CFOs, CIOs, and consultancies are adopting FinOps — cloud financial management practices — including consumption limits, real-time metric monitoring, and workload reviews. Consultancy CXP uses FinOps alongside IBM technology to help fast-growing companies stabilize exponential cost increases and right-size their cloud usage.