According to a report in The Register, six of ten servers sold in 2020 went to cloud providers. That’s pretty amazing but also not terribly surprising. We did that transition a few years back when we decommissioned our data center and starting using the cloud exclusively.
Running things on the cloud is great but you do have to understand how to make the most of it. Is it really less expensive to run a 24x7 monolithic enterprise application? Applications like that can’t take advantage of dynamic scalability so you are paying for your peak usage capacity every second of every day. You would really have to understand the costs on both sides to make the decision but it isn’t clear cut in many cases.
Another factor if you go to a SaaS model for enterprise applications is that you have to pay every month to keep access to your data and applications. In general, you can’t defer the payment or scale it to your circumstances like you can with internal infrastructure to some degree. Having a bad quarter? You still have to pay the SaaS provider the same as you did the quarter before. You can’t just defer an upgrade expenditiure to the future. This isn’t a big factor, but could still have an impact on spending flexibility especially if the overall costs are about the same.
Both of those points are minor and the cloud is the future for enterprise apps and services. As William Gibson said “The future is already here - it’s just not evenly distributed”.