On-premises clouds: not so plane and simple

Hyperscaler cloud providers are increasingly looking beyond their data centers for new services and capabilities. A decade ago, many hyperscaler cloud providers dismissed so-called hybrid clouds — where infrastructure is managed across both public cloud and on-premises venues — as unnecessary. They saw on-premises infrastructure as an outdated technology, arguing that public cloud services could do anything an on-premises deployment could do.

Over time, cloud providers have accepted that regulatory requirements, a desire for greater control, and geopolitical boundaries mean that many enterprises are not willing to fully commit to the public cloud. In the Uptime Institute annual survey, data security (60%) and regulatory and compliance (44%) stand out as the top reasons why enterprises choose not to host mission-critical workloads in the public cloud (see Uptime Institute Global Data Center Survey 2024).