Data Center World 2025

GEICO operates technology platforms are 24/7, 365 across the public and private cloud.

10 years ago, GEICO made the decision to go all-in on public cloud and evacuate its on-premises footprint, driven by a desire to innovate at scale, keep the promise to customers for service and product excellence, and modernize technology platforms by mitigating resiliency and availability issues due to aging infrastructure.

But nearly a decade in, GEICO was only 80% of the way there in migrating critical workloads hosted as IaaS/PaaS services to the public cloud. They had a presence in 8 different IaaS/PaaS cloud service providers, and at one point were one of the ten largest consumers of public cloud services with their primary CSP.

In this session, attendees will learn from GEICO's journey to the cloud and about what they learned: that while the public cloud is great for infinite scale and agility, depending on the size and maturity of workloads it's a factor that can work against you.

In 2023, influenced prohibitive cloud costs and the desire for greater control of innovation and agility, GEICO reversed course and began rebuilding on-premise data centers. They chose a better methodology to minimize the complexity of managing multiple vendor-locked solutions for Infrastructure – Open Source, Open Standards, and Open Hardware.

Takeaway

• Key learnings, benefits, and "gotchas" of journeying back from the public cloud
• Discussion of strategies to take control of engineering, optimize costs, and modernize infrastructure for enterprises.