IT Priorities 2020: Datacentres remain mainstay of enterprise IT, despite continued cloud creep

On-premise operations not going away

Interestingly, at the opposite end of this part of the poll, on-premise investments were also flagged as an investment priority for the year ahead, particularly where server and storage appliances are concerned, with 10% and 6% of respondents respectively citing these.

Again, these results are in keeping with the observations and predictions made by the analyst community about how the enterprise’s relationship with on-premise datacentres and cloud is likely to change over time, with Gartner data suggesting enterprise spending on cloud will outpace the amount spent on non-cloud IT offerings through 2022.

Taken together, all these stats suggest enterprises remain wedded to their on-premise infrastructure investments, and are increasingly looking to cloud to help supplement and support the IT workloads they have running there.

In some cases, this might be to buy the organisation some time before they are ready for a wholescale move of all their applications and workloads to the cloud, with Gartner data suggesting that 80% of enterprises will have closed their datacentres by the year 2025.

At the moment, though, its data suggests around 10% of enterprises have followed this course of action, meaning there are still many live enterprise datacentre sites out there.

Some of these may require some form of equipment upgrade or refresh to keep ticking over until enterprises are ready to move to the cloud, which is backed by the TechTarget data.

“What remains on-premise are business processes that are mission-critical and require greater oversight and more detailed levels of control than is available via cloud infrastructure and hosted models,” said Gartner, in a research note from November 2019.

There is also anecdotal evidence that some organisations, having kicked the tyres on cloud, are now migrating some workloads back on-premise for performance, security and cost reasons. A process that has been dubbed “de-clouding” .

On-site infrastructure investment

Either way, the data suggests private datacentres will remain a key component of the wider IT strategies for enterprises for a long time to come, with IT decision-makers setting out plans elsewhere in the research to invest in areas that will serve to beef up the security and improve the efficiency and performance of their facilities.

To this point, respondents to the survey were asked to pinpoint all infrastructure management tools they intend to invest in over the coming year, with security (41%), monitoring (31%) and automation (27%) technologies emerging as the top three types they plan to purchase in 2020.

The area flagged by the least amount of respondents was investing in edge computing environments, despite this being an area that respondents flagged in other areas of the poll as being centrally important to delivering on their internet of things (IoT) strategies and network-related infrastructure upgrades.

The results of this year’s poll are broadly in keeping with the insights gleaned from the 2019 version of the Computer Weekly/Tech Target IT Priorities survey, where moving to the cloud was name-checked by respondents as their top IT investment area.