After several years of what could be described as nothing less than “a race to the cloud,” technology decision-makers appear to be actively reconsidering the possibilities of moving or maintaining IT infrastructure on-premises. It’s not so much a matter of asking whether to go “on-premises or in the cloud.” That question altogether has become less relevant. As executives at IT asset management provider Flexera pointed out, “Emerging technologies no longer fit neatly into on-premises or cloud – we need new processes and teams to manage them.” IT executives agree with that assessment by a margin of about two to one (65 percent agree compared to 35 percent disagree), according to respondents surveyed for the company’s 2025 IT priorities report. Indeed, a hybrid approach has become the most common approach to IT infrastructure, as IT leaders come to understand that neither the cloud nor on-premises is always the best solution, depending on the particular use case. “On-premises computing (by any name) is on the rise again as companies solve sovereignty, cost, and data ownership/security challenges,” proclaimed Forrester researchers in the firm’s technology and security predictions for 2025. “Most large enterprises already take a hybrid cloud approach, and they will further invest in private cloud for workloads requiring data storage and processing on-premises for security, privacy and regulatory compliance (e.g., pretraining and fine-tuning of foundation models, RAG integration, AI agent automation).” In 2025, Forrester predicts that most major public cloud providers will increase investments in private cloud. In some ways, the rekindled relationship with on-premises systems could be a response to years of over-aggressive movement toward the cloud. According to Flexera’s findings, cloud adoption happened quickly, “with organizations shifting workloads to third-party data centers before realizing the need for better governance and cost control,” said Flexera executives. By Martin Vilaboy EDGE TO CLOUD 48 CHANNELVISION | JANUARY - FEBRUARY 2025 Repatriation Redux New realities leading to a rethinking of on-premises infrastructure
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