The majority of corporate IT is now off premises for the first time

IT is going remote while sucking up more power. Most corporate IT is now off-premises for the first time, according to Uptime Institute, while the average rack power density has crested above 11 kW for the first time as server fleets are gradually replaced with more powerful hardware. Uptime’s Global Data Center Survey 2026 …

[Oneman2Many]

Give it a few years and as companies find out the true cost of being off-prem they will start bringing hosting back on-prem and so the cycle will continue.

[Roland6]

Prediction for 2027: Gartner, or similar, will issue report declaring the future is on-prem, with benefits of cost saving, agility, security…

[coredump]

Could be. Presumably it'll be dependent on who is paying for Gartner's "research" at the time.

[EdSaxby]

We did the sums and determined the the compute and storage costs on all our non-production environments stacked up as far more expensive than the existing services we were running on prem.

What happened? The enterprise architects quoted Gartner and directed everything be moved to the Cloud. Obviously, they later had to reduce the level of services provided because they were costing too much.

[sketharaman]

Cloud Repatriation

This has already started happening to some extent e.g. https://www.uniquesolutionsit.com/case-studies/cloud-repatriation-at-commodities-exchange/. However, the catch is, migrating cloud workloads to onprem aka "cloud repatriation" or "cloud rebalancing" is only possible for IaaS and PaaS workloads but nor for SaaS workloads. When they moved from onprem to cloud in the last 10 years, many companies also moved to SAAS at the same time, so those workloads are not coming back onprem - unless the new trend of SaaS Repatriation (ditching cloud SAAS and using AI BUILD to build bespoke applications onprem) gathers traction. But, then AI token costs are also skyrocketing, so not sure if Saas Repatriation will go very far. Lots of moving parts, interesting times, and also funny times - in some companies, we see one application moving from onprem to cloud and another application is moving from cloud to onprem at the same time!

[Oneman2Many]

Re: Cloud Repatriation

There are plenty of CaaS solutions for on-prem cloud run apps, most advertised with the ability to cloud balance or cloud burst.

SaaS is a bit different cost wise as you generally won't be paying a hosting cost and hosting will almost certainly be shared, so hosting will be bundled into the overall charge so little chance of bringing it on-prem and generally you wouldn't want to.

[IGotOut]

No problem

"However, more than half (53 percent) of operators report difficulties finding qualified candidates for vacant roles, up from 46 percent a year ago."

It's OK, we've been told for years that we no longer need staff to do these jobs because....AI?

[williamyf]

Re: No problem

Hire me. I am 53 ¿Why you ask?.

Oh, I see. You are looking for the unicorn 21 years highly energetic highly dynamic manager with 15 years experience in DC operations.

Oh, sorry, not that, you are looking for someone, anyone at any age that has certifications on Windows, Linux, Cisco, Juniper, Arista, Servers, Storage, Electricity, Mechanics to repair the diesel generators, and HAVC systems expereience..

Say no more

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: No problem

i'm confused - because i keep seeing some of our fave DC companies advertise roles repeatedly on Linkedin yet never read the applications, or reply, or interview people.... For example the same senior role, 4 discrete times at least since May.... hundreds of people will have applied... (including me).

The problems are HR departments and managers in these firms. There are people willing and able to do the work.

[coredump]

Re: No problem

> The problems are HR departments and managers in these firms. There are people willing and able to do the work.

Yes. But not always at the wages offered by those HR departments and managers.

Plus, the (presumably "AI-powered" these days) ATS used by those companies tend to screen out people whose CV's indicate they might be old, expensive, or don't check every arbitrary box on the job post kitchen sink checklist, etc.

It's not quite the same, but I remember a hiring manager a few jobs ago whinging about not having any candidates for a job opening they had sent over to HR.

N.B. hiring manager didn't say "good candidates", they hadn't seen any. The story goes that 2 things had happened:

1) HR had taken the hiring manager's job description, which was reasonably representative of the job role and duties, slathered it with HR boilerplate, dropped some of the manager's requirements while adding some of their own, and lowered the job rank from senior/experienced to mid/junior (presumably to fit salary budgeting line item)

2) HR proceeded to screen candidates based on their fabrication, and consequently had no candidate resumes to forward along to the hiring manager for review

Hiring manager worked out what was going on after reviewing the public job post. I doubt there were real repercussions, unfortunately.

[Joe Drunk]

Re: No problem

Not all job postings are real.

[DS999]

Re: No problem

certifications on Windows, Linux, Cisco, Juniper, Arista, Servers, Storage, Electricity, Mechanics to repair the diesel generators, and HAVC systems expereience

You forgot two weeks of PTO per year, mandatory overtime, pay your own relocation expenses and starting salary of $50K with a 1% 401K match and high deductible health plan.

[Taliesinawen]

Failure modes and unplanned outages

> Uptime warns against complacency, noting that many of the factors behind outages, such as reduced or unstable power availability, local grid reliability, supply chain constraints, and extreme weather, are on the increase.

As well as someone cutting the fibre cable from the Cloud Farm with a JCB (Backhoe). Wait, isn't there a back-up cable. There is but it runs through the same pipe as the primary cable. These cloud systems don't seem to have any failure modes. As when "The Cloud" goes down your business comes to a halt. With phones and DNS also run from "The Cloud" you can't even browse or make a phone call.

[Oneman2Many]

Re: Failure modes and unplanned outages

Badly architected applications who think that being in 'the cloud' automatically means HA. Being in the cloud is no different to on-prem, architect for multiple instances with load balancers and realtime data replication if your application is that important.

[Richard 12]

Factually incorrect headline

That "10% in closets" is also on-premises.

So 54% of corporate IT is still on-prem, and last time I checked, 54% is a majority.

No longer a supermajority though.

[deadlockvictim]

What comes to mind here is the notion of single point of failure and data-centres are becoming a massive SPoF (despite all that we have been told about redundancy and load balancing).

There aren't all that many data-centres and when one goes, figurative domino blocks begin to fall. We saw this in Norway with Microsoft Azure earlier this year.

Not only are data-centres strategic targets in and of themselves, they are also becoming hated on account of higher electricity costs, mass layoffs and AI.

How soon before the villagers arrive with pitchforks?

[AgentGreen]

There's at least one major manufacturer forcing IT staff back into the office 4 days a week. Because ... reasons. No sane IT person wants to be forced to work in an office anymore, unless they deal with physical hardware. If I'm ever forced back into an office, my day doesn't start until I'm at my desk and stops the moment I walk away from it. No more checking in at random, no more looking at email off-hours. You want more out of me? Cash talks.

[Anonymous Coward]

No sure what your comment has to do with the article, but thanks for your view.

[sketharaman]

zScaler

zScaler predicted this for 2024, it has happened in 2025-2026. Not bad.