Yet another survey has found that migration to the cloud is not the panacea many people thought it might be, and unexpected expenses are driving enterprises back to on-premises computing.
A survey of more than 1,000 experts across industries and company sizes by managed hosting provider Liquid Web found that on premises computing remains a cornerstone of enterprise architecture and why.
Reasons range from compliance and cost control to performance and reliability. One big issue was unforeseen costs, with 47% of IT professionals saying they’ve faced unexpected costs, with most losses falling between $5,000 and $25,000.
However, that’s not the biggest reason for moving back. A total of 55% of IT professionals cited full customization as their top reason for choosing dedicated infrastructure over cloud. The two reasons may seem unrelated, but there is a common thread to them.
“IT professionals migrating workloads back from public cloud to dedicated environments underscores a deliberate strategy to reclaim control, customization, and predictable costs,” Ryan MacDonald, chief technology officer at Liquid Web wrote in the report. “Dedicated servers provide the control, performance, and security that IT leaders need to build future-proof architectures.”
The cloud may be popular and there has often been talk of cloud migration, but on prem is going nowhere. In the past 12 months, 42% of IT pros have migrated workloads from public cloud back to dedicated servers.
“This reversal challenges the assumption that cloud is always the end goal, and highlights growing concerns about cost predictability, control, and performance in shared cloud environments,” MacDonald told Network World.
The survey found 86% of IT professionals report that their organizations currently use dedicated servers, with government (93%), information technology (91%), and finance (90%) being the most likely industries to do so. Fifty-three percent of IT professionals still view dedicated servers as essential, and nearly half (45%) expect their role to grow by 2030.
The majority of respondents use dedicated servers for databases, with file storage and web hosting also in the mix.
Another finding as relates to customization is that 32% of IT professionals believe their current cloud spend is wasted on features or capacity they don’t fully use. Cloud service providers are notorious for providing features whether you want them or not and not giving customers the choice to opt out and cut bills.
On premises computing is not just holding steady but growing. More than one-third of respondents (34%) said their organizations increased spending on dedicated servers in 2024, compared to 24% in 2023 and 26% in 2022.
IT managers are finding their biggest challenge is explaining the value of dedicated infrastructure to management. Nearly one-third (31%) said they don’t feel confident explaining infrastructure choices to nontechnical leadership and 70% of IT professionals surveyed believe that executive leadership underestimates the role dedicated servers play in a modern tech stack.
Source:: Network World