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In this knowledge brief, we’ll look at the challenges and pressures that are leading businesses to adopt a consumption model that improves IT outcomes and boosts compute performance.

If you’re like many businesses, you’ve been enjoying the benefits of increased agility, flexibility, and consumption-based models that the Cloud brings to some of your applications. But you may also be wondering, why can’t I leverage these same benefits for other areas of my on-premises IT infrastructure?

For many IT organizations today, the drive to innovate, be competitive, and deliver reliable and optimized services has pushed them to invest in cloud technologies. But as the journey to cloud has seen many workloads move to the public cloud, a good number of critical applications have not only remained on-premises, businesses have actually realized that it is the best place for them to run and moving them to the cloud makes little sense.

However, these same organizations understand that these applications and services would benefit from the fine-grained control over resources and consumption, and the ability to use (and pay for) only what they need that comes with the Cloud. Aberdeen research has found that leading businesses are adopting “as-a-service” models to bring the power of the Cloud to all of their on-premises systems, helping them optimize compute and get the most ROI from their server investments.

With IT on-demand or “everything-as-a-service” solutions in place, these leading organizations are able to improve resource usage, IT spending, consumption and capacity, and increase innovation across all areas of their business.

In this knowledge brief, we’ll analyze the strategies and solutions that organizations are adopting in order to bring the cloud experience (and benefits) to their infrastructure without the need for costly and complex migrations or rip and replace disruptions.

The Challenge to Improve Compute Capabilities and Simplify IT

Organizations have been taking advantage of the benefits of cloud for a while now, leveraging everything from pay-per-use models, to IT metering, to flexible scaling and deployment. In many ways, these capabilities are expected for most modern applications and services.

That’s why it can be extremely frustrating for these IT organizations to not have similar advantages and capabilities for their on-premises compute capabilities. When these same businesses turn to their on-premises servers, the lack of a consumption-based model is actually limiting their productivity, efficiency, and ability to innovate.

For IT leaders at these organizations, this divergence between their cloud systems and on-premises IT infrastructure is adding needless complexity to IT management, increasing resource demands, and limiting their ability to integrate key systems and applications. And many of these businesses are finding it difficult to implement any kind of DIY cloud or “as-a-service” capabilities for their on-premises environments.

All of these challenges are pushing organizations to look for new ways to improve and optimize their on-premises server infrastructure and compute capabilities to bring increased efficiencies and transform their business. We asked businesses what the top pressures are that are leading them to optimize and upgrade their on-premises compute capabilities (Figure 1).

Figure1: Top Drivers to Modernize On-premises Servers

Looking at these top five pressures to improve on-premises compute capabilities, it’s no surprise to see that the bottom line takes three of the slots, for reducing operating costs, increasing revenue and for maximizing the ROI of servers and other IT infrastructure investments.

One of the main reasons that businesses turn to cloud and “as-a-service” solutions is to leverage things like consumption-based modeling and “pay as you go” to both reduce costs and get a better return on their computing infrastructure.

And one of the key new opportunities driving these organizations to improve is the need to embrace hybrid cloud. Businesses understand the importance of hybrid infrastructures, as it allows them to get the most out of both cloud-based and on-premises compute capabilities.

But in order to effectively make the move to hybrid, these organizations need to have cloud and “as a service” baked into their servers and systems that are running on-premises.

Reaching the Benefits of IT On-demand

In order to successfully leverage new technologies and transform their IT infrastructure, businesses are turning to on-demand, “everything-as-a-service” solutions to bring the power of public cloud to on-premises compute.

By providing the economic benefits of the Cloud, such as pay-per-use capabilities, to all aspects of on-premises IT infrastructures, without the need of extensive upfront costs, these on-demand solutions enable organizations to quickly increase agility while realizing many key benefits, such as lower IT complexity, increased management control, and reduced IT expenses.

With on-demand and “everything-as-a-service” capabilities in place for their entire IT infrastructure, any business can create a solid foundation to improve performance, reliability and reduce waste in their on-premises compute resources.

In fact, when we analyzed our research to find out what benefits organizations achieved through the use of these types of solutions—we discovered some significant gains, as shown in Table 1.

When it comes to increased agility and effectiveness, organizations with on-demand IT exceed their competitors, as they are 25% more likely to increase the speed at which they provide IT services and resolve IT issues. These businesses are also 2x more likely than their peers to see improvements in their SLA performance.

Table1: Everything-as-a-Service Brings Success Businesses leveraging an on-demand, everything-as-a-service architecture are:

By implementing a platform that brings the power of the Cloud to their entire IT environment, they see increased cost controls and efficiencies across IT, as they are 25% more likely than their competitors to report increases in overall IT productivity. And with a pay per use and consumption-based model that makes it simpler to use only those compute resources that are needed, end-users at these businesses are 40% more likely to say that they are highly satisfied with the services they receive from IT.

And when we focus in specifically on benefits these organizations achieve when it comes to their on-premises servers and compute capabilities, we see that they achieve vital gains that help them overcome their challenges and meet the drivers that are pushing them to improve. For example, with “as a service” capabilities in their on-premises servers, these organizations:

• Are 50% more likely then their competitors to report higher application performance
• Are 38% more likely to report lower IT expenditures in their compute resources and usage

Key Takeaways

If you look at the progression of cloud technologies over the last twenty years, you can see that it’s a constant and steady transformation of all areas of business technology. First, it changed the nature of applications by moving some of them to the public cloud, then private cloud brought the pay-per-use and consumption models of public cloud to on-premises services.

Now we are seeing a similar transformation in all areas of the IT infrastructure and especially on-premises compute. By following the logical course of enabling “as-a-service” capabilities to transform entire IT environments, these new on-demand solutions are allowing businesses to take the next step in innovation while reducing costs and lowering complexity.

Businesses are increasingly realizing that they can optimize their on-premises workloads and technology investments by enabling cloud capabilities that let them leverage compute in the way that delivers the benefits of the Cloud while leaving their apps and data in place—no re-factoring, no data movement. And by working with partners who understand the “as-a-service” model and have expertise in production systems, on premises, and in the data center, you can implement new compute solutions without disrupting your environment or adding cost or complexity.

With powerful on-demand and “everything-as-a-service” solutions, backed by experienced partners, organizations can free themselves from the complexity and resource demands of running IT for a modern business. They can turn these liberated resources to the task of helping their organization survive —and even thrive —in today’s difficult markets.