One can be forgiven for thinking that everything that is anything IT-related is being absorbed into the cloud. There is immense pressure to make the cloud move. As found in a recent survey[1] of 550 executives conducted by IDG, more than one-third (38%) report their IT departments are under pressure to migrate all applications and infrastructure to the cloud.
However, it's notable that at this point, most corporate IT and data assets still sit in their own data centers. There are some applications and systems that simply aren't a good fit for cloud at this time -- and may never make it into the cloud. How do IT decision-makers determine when a cloud migration doesn't make sense, and it's better to leave things on-premises? Previous iterations of the IDG survey had found 56 percent of executives intend to stay with their on-premises systems for the foreseeable future, and at least 40 percent say they are too dependent on mission-critical legacy systems to migrate to cloud.
To explore the issues of when staying on-premises versus cloud makes sense, I asked industry executives about any areas that were not suitable for cloud, and better left on-premises -- especially from the all-important data perspective. The security implications, as well as geographical presence requirements, are obvious. But there are also other facts that may make staying on-premises the most viable option. Here are some of the concerns raised:
Legacy entanglements: For starters, there may be a very complicated entanglement of on-premises assets that making moving a particular piece to the cloud a complicated project, says Hal Woods, chief technology officer at Datera[2]. "If a given application interoperates heavily with other applications that must run on-premises, then that application and