Dive Brief:

• The majority of enterprise IT workloads are still hosted in colocation or enterprise-owned data centers, according to the Data Center Industry Survey by Uptime Institute.

• Respondents reported that an average of almost two-thirds of IT assets are currently deployed in their own data centers, with 22% deployed in colocation or multi-tenant data center providers, and 13% deployed in the cloud, according to the report. The survey includes responses from 1,000 data center professionals and IT practitioners worldwide.

• The study also found the percentage of workloads residing in enterprise-owned/operated data centers has remained stable at 65% since 2014.

Dive Insight:

The cloud may get all the glory, and the hype, but some applications still work better using on-prem solutions. The study shows that businesses still leverage on-prem data centers for a large amount of work, such as large scale transaction processing on mission-critical applications. Other organizations, like banks and certain types of financial institutions, still use mainframes because of regulatory requirements.

The study demonstrates why the hybrid approach to cloud is so popular. Companies want to maintain control of some back end offerings on-site, and migrate other solutions to third-party cloud providers. For many organizations, it is still very early in the shift to the cloud. 

It's not just data centers that companies rely on. A recent survey revealed more than 60% of respondents have no plans to discontinue use of their mainframe in the foreseeable future.