Is there really a push from public cloud to on-prem?

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By Webdesk


Not exactly, but the public cloud isn’t right for every workload

It turns out that the cloud is expensive, and the more workloads you move to the cloud, the more it costs. Go figure.

When we were in the “growth at all costs” phase between 2021 and 2022, it was easy to ignore or minimize the costs associated with working in the cloud. But as companies scrutinized every entry in the technology budget, it became pretty clear that cloud bills were high and only getting bigger, and maybe we should look for ways to reduce that budgetary impact.

The brute force way would be to say, “Let’s just go back to on-prem!” But there are big questions about this approach. Why did you move to the cloud in the first place? Perhaps you thought there would be cost savings. But even if you were wrong on that point, it’s the flexibility of the public cloud that has always been the most important value proposition.

Think back to the bad old days of on-prem, when you had to plan capacity. If your business grew faster than you expected, you were pretty much stuck, putting your business in a very vulnerable position. A company’s procurement process has always been fraught with time-consuming bureaucracy. You must plan to buy servers, then rack and stack them. Even if you want to do that, do you still have the staff with those skills? Chances are you’re hiring for a cloud DevOps world.

While it’s possible to move some workloads with less pain than others, remember that Ofcom, a UK communications watchdog, released a report earlier this month criticizing the top cloud infrastructure players for making it too difficult to move workloads between clouds. to move – and presumably back on -prem, if that was the wish. If it really is so expensive and difficult, how does it make sense for companies to do it?

I decided to investigate whether companies really want to move on-prem again. I asked a group of industry experts about it, and while I got a decidedly mixed set of answers, the idea of ​​cloud repatriation seems vastly over the top.

The cloud infrastructure market is huge and growing

Let’s start with the fact that the cloud infrastructure market is huge, even if it is slowing down amid the economic uncertainties that affect every industry. The market will reach over $200 billion by 2022. The fourth quarter was up 21% to $61 billion, according to Synergy Research. Even though it was lower than last year when the market grew 36%, it was still a substantial market anyway.

“From a numerical perspective, we continue to see strong growth in the cloud market – in 2022, global spending on cloud infrastructure services was 26% higher than in 2021, despite issues in China and a much stronger US dollar – while investment in enterprise on-prem infrastructure remains weak,” John Dinsdale, principal analyst and director of research at Synergy Research, told TechCrunch+. “Servers shipped to enterprises grew 3% in 2022. Going forward, we continue to forecast strong growth in the cloud market and weak growth in on-prem infrastructure.”



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