Are we finally seeing the death of the on premise server?
Now that the dust has settled after the initial rush to introduce widespread remote working, many businesses are looking at their longer-term provision and considering what infrastructure set-up will best provide what they need for the future. For many, that is looking increasingly like a move away from on premise service provision.
A gradual shift to the cloud has been underway across the business landscape in recent years as many companies have sought to change how their IT is budgeted and take advantage of the multitude of benefits on offer via SaaS and IaaS set ups. One of the unforeseen outcomes of the Covid-19 pandemic is that this shift has effectively been accelerated. IT teams who were previously planning ahead for cloud adoption have jumped in now, rather earlier than expected. And for others, even if a cloud solution wasn’t on the radar before, it’s proved the most viable way to facilitate their people working from home.
Many businesses have long preferred to stick with their on-premise servers, in a lot of cases due to the familiarity and reassurance of having systems physically located in-house where they can be seen, checked, tweaked and backed-up by the internal IT team. And that was fine – until now of course. Without IT people actually working on site every day and themselves having to work from home, isolate, or social distance like their colleagues, managing an on-premise server has become extremely difficult, not to mention more risky.
Most businesses have initially coped by finding ways to continue functioning as best they can whilst the lock down is in force. What has changed in recent weeks is the realisation that some level of remote working for the longer term looking increasingly likely. Scientists are predicting that the Covid-19 virus could be with us for many more months at least – which means a wholesale return back to the old ways of working simply isn’t going to happen anytime soon.
More secure and flexible IT solutions are needed for the long haul
Many IT teams are now scoping out more robust infrastructure to address the problems and practicalities of this evolving ‘new normal’. The world of work is having to adapt as the guidelines for a phased return have a significant impact on physical working environments. This is particularly problematic for companies where the vast majority of employees worked in the company building, on desktops, and connected to the on-premise server with various security protocols built in.
Maintaining suitably robust security when large numbers of staff continue to work from home, in many cases using a personal device, is at best complicated and at worst, not secure enough at all. Issues with VPNs and firewalls may have been addressed under pressure, but look less attractive or secure as a long-term solution. The reality is that it is difficult (not to mention expensive) to robustly resolve remote working security issues without moving to the cloud.
Work will forever be changed by Covid-19. And as those changes continue to take effect, it is clear that businesses who have happily worked in familiar buildings and offices will have to embrace a new more flexible normality. And that could mean the end of in-house IT infrastructures as we know them.
Join us for a webinar on Tuesday 16th June 2020 at 10am, when we'll be discussing how to build a robust and resilient IT infrastructure that underpins business continuity planning after Covid-19.
