I work where we still have on-premise offerings, and we’re in a crisis because of it.<p>I am <i>not</i> against on-prem offerings, in fact quite the opposite. However, a significant swath of our customers are small-to-medium size businesses, and many don’t have access to qualified IT to run sophisticated software systems. Our contractual stipulations are very lax in terms of requiring customers to keep their hardware, software, and environment in a conducive, working order; we recommend ____ but if you fall out of spec, you assume the risk. Fine, except our contracts still put us on the hook to make sure, with reasonable effort, that the software is running. That means we spend our sparing and critical resources trying to cut pared down or specially tailored copies of our deliverables and trying to log into countless boxes to troubleshoot every banal and tedious tech support issue as to why a package isn't running or won’t install (spoiler: it’s almost always environmental: GPO restriction, firewall rule we told them we need an exception for, antivirus problems, dependencies not installed, excruciatingly out of date system, etc).<p>These two things are <i>not compatible</i> especially as software evolves and becomes more reliant on other services. The problem is that early on the organization decided to bend over backwards to make sales, now we have to choose between letting this problem spiral out of control and drag us down with it, or renegotiate the contract with better/clearer requirements or ditching on-prem which will be a mess and probably result in losing customers. That especially sucks for many of those customers, because they live in areas with poor connectivity.<p>Moral of the story: if you give your customers enough rope to hang themselves with, you’re also measuring out a length for yourself.