Is There A Future For On-Premise Datacentres?

“Enterprises are increasingly switching back to more traditional servers, with a Nutanix report finding 85% of respondents are moving up to half of their cloud-based workloads back to on-premise hardware. This shift in strategy is attested to by the emerging dominance of the hybrid cloud model, which incorporates and balances the benefits of both cloud computing and existing on-premise datacentres". [1]

For several years now Cloud publicity has focussed heavily on the services offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google and others, and they have proved highly successful. They offered enterprises a route to computing services without touching the capital budget. Experience however has shown that the Public Clouds are not without issues, mainly centred on unpredictable costs, lock-in and the simple realisation that not all workloads are best suited to cloud hosting.

More realistic is a hybrid approach with a common management of both on-premise and cloud based resources. “digital transformation strategies are simply evolving to better incorporate cloud technology, shifting from all-out cloud to a more practical solution that includes existing, pre-integrated infrastructure”.

Hybrid IT management is a key Micro Focus offering; [2] providing service management, fulfillment, assurance and governance under one roof. For example “Service Management Automation X (SMAX) delivers a machine learning based service desk to meet all your IT service management needs, on premises, in the cloud or as a Service”.[3]. Likewise, “Hybrid Cloud Management is a solution that aggregates, brokers, provisions and governs multi-cloud and on-premises resources, providing on-demand resource services to users”. [4]