For all of the focus given to cloud-native technologies over recent years, it’s sometimes easy to forget that a huge number of organizations continue to run their business critical and applications on-premises. And this will undoubtedly be the situation for some years to come within the public sector and in industries such as financial services and healthcare where organizations need to adhere to strict data privacy and security rules.

With this in mind, it’s essential that IT teams operating on-premises environments have the tools and insights they need to manage application availability, performance and security. They need full and unified visibility up and down the application stack to identify issues, understand dependencies and apply fixes in real-time, before end user experience is impacted. At the same time, on-premises teams must respond to an increasingly sophisticated and complex threat landscape. They need to be able to detect vulnerabilities and perform rapid remediation to avoid a catastrophic security breach.

This is why there is now such demand for self-hosted observability solutions which enable on-premises teams to take advantage of the very latest observability capabilities without having to leverage cloud services. While so much of the observability agenda has been targeted at cloud-native technologies, self-hosted observability solutions can now provide on-premises teams with the same AI-enabled functionality as their cloud counterparts.

On-premises computing isn’t going anywhere

Across all industries, IT departments have embraced no code and low code platforms to accelerate release velocity in response to rapidly evolving customer and employee needs. Modern application stacks provide organizations with speed, agility and resilience and undoubtedly represent the future of innovation.

However, the reality is that the transition to the cloud isn’t going to happen overnight, and, in some cases, it won’t happen at all due to the unique sensitivities of the data organizations manage.

Federal government is perhaps the most obvious example of a sector which will continue to deploy traditional, on-premises computing, largely due to strict requirements to run air-gapped environments. Likewise, state and regional government bodies must also adhere to strict regulations around data security and privacy, which make it pretty much impossible to move applications and infrastructure into a public cloud environment.

In the private sector, industries such as banking and insurance must negotiate complex data sovereignty issues. Organizations need to ensure that customer data resides within the borders of the country where they are operating. I’m sure we can all think of examples where brands have failed to comply with these rules and faced punishing fines and reputational damage.

However, it isn’t just regulation that is causing organizations to maintain applications and infrastructure on-premises. Many favor the additional control that on-premises offers, with complete visibility on where data sits and the ability to handle their upgrades in-house. We’re increasingly seeing this amongst global brands that have amassed vast volumes of sensitive intellectual property (IP) - for instance technology and semiconductor companies. They’re choosing not to store their most valuable IP outside of their organization.

Evidently then, there are and will continue to be huge numbers of organizations that still need to manage and optimize applications and infrastructure on-premises. But the challenge they face is how to ensure these applications are optimized and secure to deliver seamless end user experiences.

On-premises teams need the same cutting-edge observability solutions that are available in public cloud-native environments

To a large degree, on-premises observability has been overlooked by the market - most of observability tools only run in cloud or SaaS environments - making them unsuitable for organizations needing to maintain applications and infrastructure on-premises.

As a result, many on-premises IT teams are struggling to cope with soaring levels of complexity and overwhelming volumes of data, and to respond to an ever more sophisticated threat landscape.

Fortunately, there are some self-hosted observability solutions which enable on-premises teams to take advantage of the very latest observability capabilities. Self-hosted observability - or customer-managed observability as it is sometimes known - includes on-premises deployments or cloud-based deployments where the organization retains control of all the data and associated operations. It enables organizations to deliver the seamless and secure digital experiences which are now the catalyst for growth and competitive differentiation.

Observability provides technologists with real-time visibility into availability, performance and security up and down the IT stack, from customer-facing applications right through to core infrastructure. This allows technologists to quickly identify and address issues and threats, rather than being stuck on the back foot, scrambling to detect and locate issues. Observability can be integrated into the data center, while adhering to compliance, security, and operational frameworks.

Importantly, organizations operating on-premises environments should be looking for an observability solution which modernizes the installation of the on-premises control. This allows IT teams to take advantage of the same capabilities which are available to organizations operating cloud-native environments. This includes features such as AI-driven anomaly detection and root cause analysis, reducing the mean time to identify (MTTI) for performance issues and speeding up remediation through automated transaction diagnostics.

Organizations can also improve their security posture by deploying cutting-edge security solutions as part of their self-hosted observability approach. These allow technologists to locate and highlight application security vulnerabilities with application context, and then leverage an automated business risk score that combines application intelligence and security intelligence. With this insight, IT teams can prioritize their responses based on potential customers and business impact. The addition of Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP) enables organizations to defend the business from exploits that target application vulnerabilities. This is vital in industries such as Government and financial services which are a major target for cybercriminals due to the amount of sensitive customer and citizen data they are storing.

The message for organizations operating on-premises environments is simple - there are now cutting-edge observability tools and functionality which can help your IT teams to overcome complexity and data noise, and to optimize application performance and security. If you are serious about delivering exceptional digital experiences to customers, then you need to equip your IT teams with a self-hosted observability solution which offers modern, AI-powered functionality.