CIOs, Heed On-Premises App and Infrastructure Performance
Although legacy applications and infrastructure may not be a popular topic, their significance to organizations is crucial.
As cloud native technologies are poised to become a dominant part of computing, certain applications and infrastructure must remain on premises, particularly in regulated and other industries.
Amid the buzz surrounding no-code and low-code platforms, technologists must prioritize acquiring the appropriate tools and insights to manage on-premises environments’ availability and performance. Consumer expectations for flawless digital experiences continue to rise, so companies must optimize their on-premises customer-facing applications to accommodate.
For Some, On-Premises Infrastructure Will Remain Essential
Much of the recent digital transformation across multiple industries can be attributed to a substantial shift to the cloud. Cloud native technologies are in high demand due to their ability to expedite release velocity and optimize operations with speed, agility, scale and resilience.
Nevertheless, it’s easy to overlook the fact that many organizations, especially larger enterprises, still run their applications and infrastructure on premises. While this may seem surprising, it’s partially due to the time-consuming process of seamlessly and securely migrating highly intricate, legacy applications to the cloud. Often, only a portion of an application may be migrated to the cloud while major components will remain on-premises. Additionally, as cloud expenses continue to escalate, cost must be considered and closely managed. In today’s tough economic environment, business leaders and technologists are increasingly discerning about what and how they migrate to the cloud, keeping cost management top of mind.
However, the core reason organizations are keeping their application on premises is for control and visibility. Technologists desire these two components for their applications and infrastructure and want to know their data’s exact location and manage upgrades within their own premises. In fact, this need for control can particularly be found within large global brands with sensitive intellectual property (IP), as IT leaders perceive it too great a risk to store their most valuable assets outside of their organization.
Naturally, there are also other industries where data privacy and security severely restrict organizations’ ability to migrate to the cloud. Some federal government agencies, for example, are required to operate air-gapped environments with no internet access, and there are stringent regulations governing the handling of citizen data in industries such as healthcare and pharmaceuticals.
Also, financial services institutions must comply with strict data sovereignty regulations to ensure customer data stays within the border of the operating country, making it impossible to relocate applications that manage customer data to a public cloud environment. It’s clear organizations must manage and optimize legacy applications within their on-premises environment, and this will remain the case for the foreseeable future.
Sudden Increases in Demand Handled On-Premises
Technologists today are faced with the challenges of scaling on-premises applications and infrastructure to accommodate fluctuating demand. Cloud providers are able to excel in effectively managing this challenge through automatic workload scaling in modernized architectures.
Every industry experiences major spikes in demand, including retail, finance, travel or healthcare, making it essential for IT teams to prepare for these fluctuations with seamless and rapid scaling of their on-premises applications and infrastructure to get them through.
Organizations must use an observability platform with dynamic baselining capabilities that can set off additional capacity in their hyperscaler environments to achieve this seamless experience.
Prepare Yourself for the Hybrid Future
Over the next few years, many organizations are likely to adopt a hybrid strategy of maintaining mission-critical applications and infrastructure on-premises, while transitioning other IT elements into public cloud environments. By combining control and compliance of on-premises with the scale, agility and speed of cloud native, this approach offers the best outlook for a hybrid future.
As more applications run across on-premises and cloud environments, IT teams responsible for managing availability and performance face significant challenges. Today, most IT departments use separate tools to monitor on-premises and cloud applications, which brings a lack of visibility across the entire application path in hybrid environments. IT leaders can’t visualize the path up and down the application stack and they can’t derive business context, making it virtually impossible to troubleshoot issues quickly. This leaves them in a firefighting mode to solve issues before they affect end users. An IT department’s worst nightmare, like an outage or even damaging downtime, surges when metrics such as MTTR and MTTX inevitably rise.
To avoid these issues, IT teams require an observability platform for unified visibility across their entire IT estate. Through this platform, IT leaders can access real-time insights of IT availability and performance across both on-premises and public cloud environments and are able to correlate IT data with real-time business metrics, allowing them to prioritize issues that matter most to customers and the business.
While cloud native technologies will continue to dominate headlines, IT teams must also optimize availability and performance within on-premises environments. For many organizations, their most critical applications will remain on-premises for the foreseeable future. In return, it’s crucial for technologists to keep their eye on the ball and ensure they have the tools and visibility to monitor and manage highly dynamic and complex microservices environments, optimizing availability and performance at all times.
