Renewed Interest in Dedicated Servers as IT Heads Rush to Address AI and Compliance Demands
In the rapidly evolving world of technology, a significant shift has occurred in 2024. Dedicated servers, once considered a relic of the past, are making a strong comeback as organisations prioritise reliable AI performance, regulatory compliance, predictable costs, and full infrastructure control over the perceived convenience of public cloud environments.
According to a recent survey, just over one-third (34%) of respondents reported an increase in spending on dedicated servers in 2024. This trend is driven by several key factors, including the increasing demand for high-performance AI applications, stricter compliance requirements, the need for cost predictability, and the desire for greater control and customisation.
The rise of AI applications, especially model training and inference, requires high, predictable performance that dedicated servers provide better than shared cloud environments. Industries like government, finance, and healthcare prefer dedicated servers for sensitive data handling due to stricter compliance demands and the ability to fully control data and encryption.
Dedicated servers offer fixed pricing without metered usage, helping IT teams forecast budgets accurately and avoid unexpected cloud cost spikes, especially for steady, resource-intensive workloads. Furthermore, dedicated servers provide full resource allocation with no noisy neighbours, customizable infrastructure, and dedicated bandwidth, which many organisations find critical for their core operations.
Interestingly, a significant portion (around 42%) of IT professionals reported migrating workloads from public cloud back to dedicated servers in 2024, highlighting growing dissatisfaction with cloud in areas like control, latency, costs, and compliance risks.
This revival is observed across organisations of all sizes and sectors, but especially in compliance-heavy fields such as government, IT, and finance, with around 86% overall using dedicated servers, and smaller companies also increasing adoption.
IT leaders are still looking for improvements in scaling and access to modern developer tools for dedicated servers. However, dedicated servers remain a foundational component of enterprise infrastructure, especially in industries where performance, control, and compliance are critical.
In summary, dedicated servers are proving to be a viable and preferred choice for organisations in 2024, delivering predictable, customisable environments that serve mission-critical needs. The trend is expected to continue as nearly as many (45%) believe the importance of dedicated servers will grow even more by 2030.
[1] Source: TechTarget (2024) [2] Source: Forbes (2024) [3] Source: CIO Dive (2024) [4] Source: ZDNet (2024)
In the pursuit of reliable AI performance, regulatory compliance, and cost predictability, many organisations are increasing their spending on dedicated servers, as indicated in a recent survey (Source: TechTarget, 2024). With the growing need for greater control and customisation, particularly in compliance-heavy fields like government, finance, and healthcare, dedicated servers are becoming a foundational component of enterprise infrastructure (Source: CIO Dive, 2024). With 45% of IT leaders expecting the importance of dedicated servers to grow even more by 2030, the spotlight is on cybersecurity and data-and-cloud-computing to address emerging challenges and ensure these systems maintain a robust level of security in the evolving landscape (Source: Forbes, 2024).
