By TJ Loughlin, Senior Product Manager at Ocient
We all know that the cloud is now all-but-ubiquitous in the enterprise world. Forbes says 94% of companies are using some form of cloud computing, and 67% of enterprise infrastructures are now cloud-based. But here’s the thing: on premises hasn’t gone away. In fact, our most recent Beyond Big Data survey showed one in three (34%) IT leaders in our survey said their data analytics roadmap for the next 12-18 months will include a partial return to an on-premises model. And 27% said they’ll be prioritizing an on-prem deployment model over the next 1-3 years.
The challenge is this: Although many enterprises are focusing on cloud-based offerings, some of the industries with the most pressing needs—Telco, AdTech, etc.—know they need to keep much of their highly sensitive and highly regulated data on premises.
These are companies whose differentiation and success almost entirely depends on how quickly and effectively they can transform data into value. They need solutions that can handle the rapid growth and all-the-time nature of their datasets, analyzing their data efficiently to extract as much business value as possible. They need these hyperscale solutions to function in an on-prem deployment, and they don’t want to compromise on performance or efficiency.
How Ocient delivers true flexibility
At Ocient, we’ve been fully invested in supporting on-prem from the start. We very intentionally developed the Ocient Hyperscale Data Warehouse™ to offer the same level of functionality and performance whether it’s deployed in cloud or on-prem. We know the unique benefits on-prem setups can provide in the right circumstances. In fact, our hyperscale solutions depend on our own on-prem infrastructure that’s purpose-built to deliver the highest levels of performance and efficiency for our customers’ hyperscale workloads, while using the cloud to develop, test and refine new solutions.
The result is a unique hyperscale offering that gives organizations the complete freedom to run always-on, compute-intensive workloads on-prem, in the cloud, or both, while enjoying outstanding performance and efficiency.
Key barrier to cloud repatriation: the IT talent gap
The same thing that gives on-prem its advantages in the right circumstances creates upfront barriers for the companies that need—or want—to leverage on-prem setups. Because while the upside is that you can build exactly the infrastructure you need to maximize performance and efficiency for your unique workloads, the downside is you have to actually build—and then manage—that on-prem hardware stack. The heavy lift isn’t just the CapEx investment in the hardware; it’s having the in-house resources to manage that hardware. In fact, even the largest internal IT teams can quickly get overwhelmed by the dynamic demands of managing hyperscale solutions in an on-prem deployment.
Moreover, it’s not always as easy as “just staff up.” It’s harder and more expensive than ever to find good IT talent. And as noted elsewhere in our Beyond Big Data survey, the lack of—and inability to hire—adequate technical talent is now a major limiting factor in companies’ ability to make the most of data analytics, no matter where those analytics workloads live.
Bringing aaS (as a Service) simplicity to on-prem
As big believers in on-prem, Ocient has developed a unique solution to the IT talent gap many of our customers face: We bring the by-now-classic aaS (as a Service) managed model to the on-prem world. Our team helps our customers to choose the right tech to build out their on-prem infrastructure. Then, we provide a managed service model for that on-prem infrastructure—in a familiarly flexible pay-as-you-go aaS package.
So, our customers can make decisions on where to locate workloads based purely on what’s best from a performance, security, and cost perspective. They can leverage on-prem where it makes sense—without having to build an IT services company within their organization. Our customers can focus on what they want to do with their always-on, compute-intensive workloads, rather than tying up time, budget and energy on the administrative hassles of managing those workloads.