Results from Uptime Institute’s 2023 Global Data Center Survey show a majority of enterprise IT workloads are now being hosted off-premises, indicating that more organisations are outsourcing workloads to third-party data centres and services.
Figure 1: Where IT workloads are running today
Benefits of outsourcing
In their Data Center and IT Spending Survey, Uptime Institute discovered that only one-quarter of operators (25%) are shifting a greater proportion of workloads from their data centres to public cloud or colocation – down 8-pts from last year’s Spending Survey
Outsourcing workloads offloads the complexity and financial costs of building and managing their own data centres, as well as offering more efficiency than on-premises facilities. Outsourcing also enables pay-as-you-go flexibility for customers to control usage at their convenience.
“Large cloud and colocation facilities often benefit from economies of scale – such as when purchasing mechanical and electrical equipment,” says Max Smolaks, Uptime Institute Research Analyst. “Third-party facilities also help organisations bring their IT services closer to their commercial sites.”
Key findings
Figure 2: The cost of IT workloads
The study revealed that more than half of the enterprise respondents (56%) said that maintaining their data centres was cheaper than in a colocation facility, and more than half (51%) said it was cheaper to provision workloads in their facilities than outsourcing to a public cloud.
Around 29% report using hybrid (a combination of their own, colo, and/or cloud Edge facilities) Edge Data Centers. More than half (52%) report utilizing six or more Edge Data Centers.
Around 60% of the respondents report deploying hybrid applications as opposed to full ones at their Edge locations, indicating that Edge facilities play a critical role in the delivery of business-critical applications.
