Air Gap On-Prem Use Cases for the Security-Conscious Enterprise

August 27, 2021

Part 2 of the Intellyx On-Prem Innovation Series, for Replicated

When I think of the most mission-critical on-premises secure installation scenario of all time, my mind immediately wanders to silos. Missile silos, to be exact.

If there ever was a reason to be absolutely 100-percent-sure a system was inaccessible to the outside world, and thus positively unhackable, it would be to prevent an unauthorized launch. Any software update that happens in that control room had better be hand-installed from a disk and checked by a high-security clearance individual.

Granted, most of us don’t have to sweat the global consequences of a Wargames-style nuclear brinkmanship event if our business software isn’t securely air gapped.

Still, it wouldn’t hurt to take a page from the missile-command playbook in thinking about your organization’s mission-critical environments to understand when on-prem air gap installations provide the best balance of risk avoidance and value for critical systems.

What are some of the most compelling use cases for on-prem air gap software installations?

On-prem prospects for software vendors

I hear rosy cloud-based growth projections from independent software vendors (ISVs) on a daily basis. Every one of them touts the impressive sales growth stats of their latest SaaS or cloud offerings in relation to their existing on-prem business.

You can’t blame vendors for wanting to position themselves as ‘modern’ for IT analysts and investors, touting that they are selling service-based software — but for security, compliance, and control reasons, real-world businesses demand modern software delivered on-premises.

Among many other surprising facts revealed in this 2021 State of On-Prem study was the fact that almost all ISVs — 92% even — are reporting increased sales of on-prem software to customers — and at least half of them reported ‘strong growth’ in sales!