The Pandemic Is Laying Waste to On-prem Data Centers

In a survey of 1,600 IT professionals by network specialist Aryaka, more than half (51%) of respondents said they they were planing to close all of their on-prem data centers in the next 24 months, and 27% said they would eliminate at least some of their facilities – all in favor of cloud computing.

The latest victim of the pandemic is quite surprising: legacy in-house data centers. In a survey of 1,600 IT professionals by network specialist Aryaka, more than half (51%) of respondents said they they were planing to close all of their on-prem data centers in the next 24 months, and 27% said they would eliminate at least some of their facilities – all in favor of cloud computing.

The change is thought to have been caused by the rapid introduction of hybrid work models, which pushed businesses to embrace the cloud and applications delivered as a service. “As you move resources to the cloud, it becomes increasingly inefficient for all these branch offices and remote employees to hairpin, as I would call it, back to the traditional on-prem data centers,” Dave Ginsburg, VP of product marketing at Aryaka, told Data Center Knowledge. At the same time, the pandemic has elevated the importance of Wide Area Network (WAN) technology and secure access service edge (SASE) – a new term invented by Gartner to encompass most of the infrastructure services necessary for remote work.

“This creates the need for very dynamic bandwidth reallocation, when you’ve got employees moving from a remote location to on-prem, either headquarters or branches. There’s flexibility in that movement; and so, the network also has to offer the same level of flexibility,” Ginsburg said.

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