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In this Aberdeen knowledge brief, we’ll look at how leading organizations are taking important steps to get the most out of their investments in public cloud and their on-premises computing capabilities.
Every day, one comes across statements or truisms that people take as common knowledge but that are actually wrong. Darth Vader never says “Luke, I am your father†and no one in Casablanca ever says “Play it again, Sam.†And it looks like we can now add to that list the misconception that all workloads are moving to the public cloud.
For years now, we’ve heard the constant predictions that everything would be moved to the public cloud and that businesses, and especially small to midsized ones, would no longer need any on-premises infrastructure at all. But these predictions have proven to be inaccurate.
In fact, Aberdeen research has shown that, over the last three years, organizations have actually increased their use of on-premises servers and infrastructure. This is even true of cutting-edge businesses leveraging containers and Kubernetes, who have increased their use of on-premises and doubled their use of private cloud.
In this Aberdeen knowledge brief, we’ll take a high-level look at the key pressures that businesses face in their infrastructure and the challenges and drivers that are making many businesses decide to reinvest in their on-premises capabilities.
The Drive to Boost On-Premises Capabilities
In recent years, the makeup of modern IT infrastructures has seen a massive and constant rate of change. Virtualization reduced the need for hardware servers, cloud utilized virtualization to move compute resources out of data centers, and now trends in containers and microservices are transforming how applications are developed and deployed. Tied to all of these changes is the move to hybrid cloud, which is enabling organizations to get the most out of both their public cloud resources and their on-premises server capabilities.
And in response to all of these changes, businesses came to the realization that the previous driver to put every workload on the Cloud was no longer the best strategy. In fact, many organizations have put this movement into reverse, and have moved workloads from the public cloud and back to on-premises implementations.
Over the last few years, Aberdeen has surveyed businesses about their application and workload deployment. And from 2018 to 2020, we’ve seen more workloads move from the public cloud to private cloud and on-premises servers.
- Deployments using private cloud and on-premises systems have nearly doubled
- Workloads on public cloud have gone down by 25%
Of course, this isn’t a death knell for public cloud providers, who are still vital for most modern businesses. And it doesn’t mean we’ll see a resurgence in giant, floor spanning data centers.
But organizations are realizing that to get the most out of their IT infrastructure, they need flexible platforms that give them the best performance, management, and resiliency for their many varied workloads. Interestingly, when we analyzed the top pressures driving businesses moving to on-premises versus those moving to public cloud, there weren’t huge differences, but there were deltas, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: The Different Pressures to Improve On-premises and Public Cloud
Organizations with an on-premises focus are 30% more likely to be driven by the move to hybrid cloud, which makes perfect sense as a successful hybrid cloud implementation relies on strong on-premises capabilities. Also, on-premises organizations are less likely than their public cloud peers to be pressured by rising complexity, meaning that their increased use of on-premises systems is easing their management burden and lowering complexity.
Innovating from an On-premises Infrastructure
Another interesting result we saw from our research is that the businesses running increased workloads on-premises are leveraging new technologies to the same level or higher than public cloud users. For example, on-premises organizations were 10% more likely to be developing microservices.
And from a benefit perspective, a move to more on-premises workloads is enabling these businesses to see some key benefits. In our research, they were more likely than public cloud focused organizations to see lower IT costs, reduced complexity, and higher customer and user satisfaction.
So, despite expectations and predictions that everything would be on the Cloud by now, we’re seeing the opposite. More workloads are actually moving to on-premises and are leveraging technologies that enable them to integrate and effectively work with the cloud, creating more dynamic, agile and resilient IT infrastructures.
It really does look as if on-prem computing is making a comeback. Or to misquote a popular misquote. Play that on-premises computing again, Sam.
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Aberdeen Strategy & ResearchOpens a new window , a division of essidsolutions Ziff DavisOpens a new window , with over three decades of experience in independent, credible market research, helps illuminate market realities and inform business strategies. Our fact-based, unbiased, and outcome-centric research approach provides insights on technology, customer management, and business operations, to inspire critical thinking and ignite data-driven business actions.