Cloud computing, one of the six new areas that have characterized the Second Computer Age (or the New Internet Age) is being said to revolutionize IT operations for companies, where companies use a communal storage facility for all their data and operations. While a groundbreaking concept indeed, it is not seeing the sweeping embrace across the IT spectrum, like a new technology usually commands. On the contrary, organizations have been found moving back to on-site computing owing to a variety of technical and operational reasons.
Some organizations have been found to have doubled their use of the private cloud and on-site data storage, moving it back from public clouds, with the usage of the latter having gone down by 25%. Besides on-side premises, companies have also doubled their use of private clouds. This has been dictated primarily by reducing complexity in operations, which a public cloud often entails given the scale and magnitude of data it handles and the varied workloads companies have. Public clouds have not been found to offer that flexibility. The findings were encountered by Aberdeen, a technology research firm.
“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 micro services 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,” said the ‘Knowledge Brief’ by Aberdeen.
Also, organizations which rely heavily on on-premises IT infrastructure, are 30% more likely to move a ‘hybrid cloud’, which involves using a mix of on-premises, private cloud and third party public clouds. “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,” the report added.
The flexibility offered by on-site and hybrid clouds can be gauged by another finding in the report which said that organisations with a strong on-site focus were equally, or sometimes even more, capable of leveraging new technologies and 10% more likely to develop microservices. Higher customer and user satisfaction were also found to be other benefits accruing to on-site and hybrid cloud intensive companies.