How Optimizing Workloads Can Help You to Modernize Your Infrastructure

As organizations continue their digital transformation journey, one of the biggest challenges they face is determining where their workloads should reside. While it’s true that the cloud offers scalability, agility and ease of deployment, many companies are having to reassess their cloud strategies due to rising costs and evolving business needs.

This shift has sparked a huge conversation around workload rightsizing — a strategic approach to balancing cloud repatriation and cloud retention to optimize performance and cost-efficiency.

For years, the dominant trend in IT was to move as many workloads as possible to the cloud. What some of our customers have found, however, is that many workloads are more expensive to run in the cloud than originally anticipated. These organizations are now looking for ways to strategically bring certain workloads back on-premises while keeping others in the cloud where they are most effective.

Rather than framing this shift purely as “cloud repatriation,” IT leaders are focusing on right-sizing applications and infrastructure. The goal is to optimize workload placement based on cost, performance, security and business agility.

What we’ve learned is that many of the IT leaders we’ve spoken to are feeling pressure from their executives to bring back data on-premises to fully take advantage of artificial intelligence (AI).

AI-driven initiatives are making on-premises expansion a necessity for many organizations. Here’s why:

• Proximity to large datasets: AI workloads require rapid access to vast datasets, and storing this data on-premises can significantly reduce latency compared to cloud storage.
• Performance and cost efficiency: The computational demands of AI models often make cloud-based processing cost-prohibitive. Investing in on-premises GPUs and high-performance computing (HPC) solutions can provide long-term cost savings.
• Data control and security: AI models and proprietary datasets are highly valuable intellectual property. Keeping AI-related data on-premises ensures greater control, security and compliance with regulatory requirements.

It’s no secret that AI is a powerful tool for the organizations willing to put in the work to modernize their data centers.

Many of the actions you’ll take to modernize — such as upgrading to a lower latency network, refreshing your storage architecture and upgrading your power and cooling capabilities — will ultimately benefit your organization as a whole, in addition to enabling your AI engines.

But before you can rightsize your workloads, there are a few questions you’ll need to address:

• Do I have the physical infrastructure and staff to support a large-scale return to on-premises?
• Is my data center equipped to handle increased power and cooling demands?
• What planning and support do I need to successfully repatriate workloads?

Rather than choosing between cloud and on-premises, organizations need to shift toward a true hybrid cloud strategy.

• Place static, predictable workloads back on-premises to reduce unnecessary cloud costs.
• Keep cloud-native applications in the cloud, where they can scale efficiently.
• Use a multicloud strategy to avoid vendor lock-in and optimize workloads across AWS, Azure and other cloud platforms.

Our expertise across all major cloud providers and on-premises environments allows organizations to design a hybrid strategy that maximizes performance while controlling costs and sets you on the path to workload rightsizing.

CDW offers workload assessments to analyze application profiles and determine the best-fit infrastructure for each workload, and our hybrid infrastructure experts can help you to seamlessly migrate workloads — whether it’s to the cloud, between clouds or back on-premises.

Infrastructure modernization is no longer just about cloud adoption — it’s about continuous optimization and strategic workload placement. For businesses looking to optimize their infrastructure for the future, it’s about the right workloads in the right place.