Data Gravity: Why Your On-Prem Workloads Are Stuck

You’ve got a solid cloud strategy. Your team’s on board. The budget’s approved. But somehow, your most critical workloads are still firmly planted in your data centre.  

There’s a name for this. It’s not ‘legacy thinking’ or ‘resistance to change’—it’s data gravity, and it’s probably the biggest obstacle you haven’t fully considered in your cloud journey. 

Our consultant Chris recently broke down this concept in a short video. You can watch his explanation below, or read on as we look into what data gravity really means, why it’s keeping your workloads earthbound, and most importantly, how to break free. 

Data gravity is the idea that large data sets naturally attract applications, services, and other data to them; much like how gravity pulls objects together in space. The larger your data mass becomes, the stronger its pull on everything around it. 

In IT terms, this means that as your data accumulates in one location (typically on-premises), it becomes increasingly difficult and expensive to move anything away from it. 

Think of it this way: when you first stored that critical database on your servers, it was just data sitting in storage. But over the years, you’ve built applications that query it. You’ve created reporting tools that analyse it. You’ve integrated business processes that depend on it. Each new connection adds weight to the system, making it harder to shift any single component without affecting everything else. 

The data gravity concept is a daily reality for organisations trying to modernise their infrastructure. Every gigabyte of data, every integrated system, and every dependent process adds to the gravitational field that keeps your workloads locked in place. 

We see examples of data gravity manifest across loads of different sectors. 

Take legal firms with decades of case files stored on-premises. When they try to move just their billing system to the cloud, performance tanks. Every invoice needs to pull data from those local servers, turning millisecond queries into multi-second ordeals. 

Or consider a manufacturing company with fifteen years of ERP data trying to move just their PowerBI reporting to Azure. They end up seeing query times jump from seconds to minutes as reports struggle to pull data across that cloud-to-premises divide. 

Financial services can have it rough, too. Picture a wealth management firm where client portfolios, trading history, and compliance records need to stay on specific systems for regulatory reasons. This creates both technical and regulatory ‘gravity’ that keeps their modern client portal tethered to legacy infrastructure. None of these problems are particularly simple to fix. 

In many ways, the data gravity problem is getting worse. Every day, your organisation generates more data, creates new dependencies, and adds complexity to your existing systems. So the longer you wait to address data gravity, the harder it becomes to overcome. 

What happens if you stay put? Hidden costs mount up. 

On-prem infrastructure needs constant maintenance, regular hardware refreshes, and dedicated staff to keep everything running. You’re paying for power, cooling, and physical space. But maybe the biggest cost is opportunity. While you’re managing servers, your competitors are moving forward with cloud-native services, AI capabilities, and global scale that on-premises infrastructure simply can’t match. 

When data gravity keeps you earthbound, you end up with innovation bottlenecks, too. 

Want to implement machine learning models? Good luck training them efficiently when your data is stuck in a local data centre. Need to scale globally? Try explaining to international customers why your services are slow because all your data lives in a single UK location. Want to enable remote work? Watch productivity crater as remote employees struggle with VPN connections to access on-prem resources. 

The competitive disadvantage can get worse over time, too. Cloud-native competitors can deploy new features in minutes and scale instantly to meet demand. They can make use of cutting-edge services that’d take you months or years to build out on-premises. Every day that data gravity keeps you stuck is a day your competition pulls further ahead. 

What starts as a practical architecture decision becomes ‘vendor lock-in’ by stealth: not because a vendor trapped you, but because your data’s mass makes it too expensive and risky to migrate elsewhere. 

In Microsoft Azure, there’s an arsenal of tools to help your systems break free from that gravitational pull. 

The key isn’t trying to move everything at once—remember how rockets launch in stages? Instead, we’d recommend a strategic, phased approach that gradually shifts your centre of gravity to the cloud. 

Start by identifying your data hotspots—those massive data sets and tightly coupled applications creating the strongest gravitational pull. Azure Migrate’s assessment tools can map dependencies, estimate migration costs, and identify which workloads can move independently. 

This is really helpful to figure out data flow patterns, peak usage times, and critical business processes. 

You might consider creating a migration roadmap that starts with loosely coupled systems (those with minimal data gravity) and gradually works toward your core data stores. This could help build confidence, develop skills, and create momentum for larger migrations. 

Azure SQL Managed Instance for database workloads 

For organisations with big SQL Server investments, Azure SQL Managed Instance offers a game-changing solution to the data gravity problem. With near 100% compatibility with on-premises SQL Server, you can lift and shift entire databases without rewriting applications. 

This platform maintains all the features your applications expect (stored procedures, SQL Agent jobs, cross-database queries) while adding cloud benefits like automatic patching, built-in high availability, and intelligent performance tuning. You’re moving the entire gravitational field of your data to Azure, where your applications can follow naturally. And Azure handles most of the operational overhead, meaning much less of a burden on your IT teams. 

Azure File Sync for file-heavy workloads 

File shares are a bit of a tricky challenge when it comes to dealing with data gravity. 

Those terabytes of engineering drawings, legal documents, or creative assets are accessed by users expecting local network speeds. Azure File Sync elegantly solves this by creating a hybrid model that gradually shifts everything to the cloud while maintaining local performance. 

Here’s how it works in practice: your files live in Azure Files (a fully managed cloud SMB/NFS file share), but frequently accessed files are cached on your local servers. Users continue working as they always have, accessing files at local network speeds. Meanwhile, cold data automatically tiers to the cloud, freeing up expensive on-premises storage. 

So it’s a nice gradual transition. You start by syncing less critical shares, growing your confidence in the solution, then progressively moving more data to Azure. The ‘gravitational pull’ weakens over time until eventually, Azure becomes your primary data repository with on-premises servers serving merely as cache endpoints. 

Integration with Azure Backup and Azure Security Center means your files are protected, encrypted, and compliant with your governance requirements. Plus, you can access these files from anywhere, so you can enjoy remote work scenarios that’d be impossible with purely on-prem storage. 

You could also consider Azure Arc, which extends Azure’s management plane to your on-premises infrastructure, so you can manage hybrid resources through a single pane of glass. This is pretty great for maintaining control during the transition period when some workloads are in Azure and others are on-premises. 

When you successfully address data gravity with Azure, the transformation goes far beyond just having workloads in the cloud. 

• Greater agility and scalability means responding to business demands in minutes, not months. Need extra capacity for a product launch? Scale up instantly. Seasonal business fluctuation? Scale down to save costs. Elasticity like this is impossible when data gravity chains you to fixed on-premises infrastructure. 

• Cost reduction comes from multiple angles. Obviously, you’re reducing capital expenditure on hardware, but you’re also cutting operational costs. No more emergency hardware replacements or over-provisioning for peak loads that rarely happen. (Check out our guide to Azure Cost Optimisation to find out more.) 

• Enhanced security and compliance make use of Microsoft’s massive security infrastructure. Azure’s compliance certifications cover virtually every regulatory requirement, from GDPR and beyond. Threat protection, encryption, and access controls that’d cost loads to implement on-prem come standard with Azure services. 

• Great hybrid capabilities acknowledge that not everything moves at once. Azure’s hybrid powers mean you can maintain critical local access while expanding your cloud reach. This means there are multiple tools to use to find the right balance for your organisation. 

Data gravity is real, it’s powerful, and it’s probably affecting your organisation more than you realise. But it’s not insurmountable. With Azure’s comprehensive toolkit and a well-planned approach, you can break free from the gravitational pull of on-premises data and unlock the full potential of cloud computing. 

Don’t let data gravity hold your digital transformation hostage. Every journey to the cloud begins with a single workload. The question isn’t whether or not you can overcome data gravity; it’s “when will you start?”