Some Apps Moving Back from Cloud to Premises

While applications with unpredictable usage may be best suited to the public clouds offering elastic resources, workloads with more predictable characteristics can often run on-premises at a lower cost than public cloud, a study by Nutanix suggests.

As a result, many organizations plan to move at least some applications back away from the cloud and back on premises. Some 73 percent of respondents reported that they are moving some applications off the public cloud and back on premises. 

While 37 percent of enterprise workloads are running in some type of cloud today, some applications seem candidates for moves back in house:

* desktop and application virtualization

* customer relationship management

* enterprise resource planning

* data analytics and business intelligence

* databases

* development and testing

* data backup and recovery

About 22 percent of those users are moving five or more applications back in house. 

Savings are also dependent on businesses’ ability to match each application to the appropriate cloud service and pricing tier. Since plans and fees change frequently, enterprises and organizations must “remain diligent about regularly reviewing service plans and fees.”

That also suggests the importance of a multi-cloud strategy, to avoid lock-in. Fully 95 percent of survey respondents suggested it is essential or desirable to be able to easily move applications between cloud environments.

Security remains the biggest single issue related to further cloud decisions. Some 60 percent of respondents said that the state of security among clouds would have the biggest influence on their plans. 

Also, data security and compliance were listed by 26 percent of respondents as the top concerns for deciding where an enterprise runs a given workload.

The survey also suggests the shift to some use of cloud computing continues. About 24 percent of respondents are not using cloud computing. In perhaps a year, the number of enterprises with no cloud deployments will plummet to seven percent. 

source: Nutanix 

In two years, the “no cloud” percentage might drop to three percent.