Half of respondents to a recent 451 Alliance survey said they expect their organization’s physical compute infrastructure footprint to increase over the next two years. Only 22% plan to decrease their footprint and 28% said they do not expect their footprint to change.
This finding is not particularly surprising, but it’s interesting to dive deeper into the data to see which types of organizations are driving the growth in on-premises compute footprints.
Laggards vs. Early Adopters
“The casual observer might think IT laggards – the ones who have fallen behind the trends – are the ones who are increasing their compute footprints and everybody else is moving off to the cloud. Actually, this is not the case at all,” said Christian Perry, Research Manager at 451 Research, in the 451 Alliance webinar, Unpacking Workload Deployment Strategies.
Perry noted that it’s the most innovative organizations – the early adopters – who are increasing their compute footprint. These organizations are “also the ones having the most success transforming their environments into software-defined ecosystems – complete with automation, orchestration, and hybrid cloud capability,” said Perry.
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Thus, these organizations have justification for investing in their on-premises environment. “For example,” Perry noted, “when looking at new technology adoption, those who are early technology adopters – ‘the brave ones’ – are more likely to increase their compute footprint.” Organizations currently executing a digital transformation are also more likely to increase their compute footprint.
Perry said that laggards might be more likely than early adopters to move to public cloud because they are unable to manage their on-premises environment. Those organizations that can manage it are investing on-premises.
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