Enterprises that have a significant monthly cloud bill should business-case an approach that uses the cloud for public-facing assets but considers on-promises virtual hosting with no incremental telecom increase. A local deployment of a set of virtual servers can be done in a Linux or Windows context. Depending on hardware, platform, and workload, an on-premises server should be able to host between 1 and 7 virtual server guests.
Most server deployments are now virtual. Aside from edge cases that rely on raw horsepower or low latency, like file servers and voice over ip servers, baremetal rarely wins the business case.
The flexibility and benefits of virtualization have led to practices and tools that require multiple versions of a server image, for devops or redundancy, and powerful automation tools that can script the creation, orchestration, and destruction of virtual servers as needed.
There are also network effect reasons why for a small business to be left with an AWS account by a web developer is not such a bad thing.
However, even enterprises in the 20 employee range will accumulate a number of server processes, most hosted on public cloud services, which will each incur recurring monthly fees. Some of those enterprises would save money by bringing the processes on-premises and in-house.
There are business cases that make sense for the cloud. The web site should live in the cloud. As a related example, though, the web site’s backup can be hosted on a local server connected to the on-premises DSL line.
For Linux workloads, virt-manager with KVM and Qemu is a good combination — Boxes leverages this toolset as well.
A hybrid approach, typically with the web marketing server as well as email and calendar services on public clouds, but with backoffice, ERP, database, and backup operations performed in virtual servers hosted in on-premises equipment, at a lower cost than the equivalent service from an asset hosted externally by a vendor. Of course, this comes with the responsibility for an offsite backup and disaster recovery plan. Start with 2 hard drives, and take one offsite each week. then get fancier, maybe with another on-premises server at another campus.
Systems can even be hybrid, with a public-facing website on a cloud service mounting cheap assets stored on an on-premises server.
For Windows, some shops use VMware quite effectively, especially with its server and management tools. However I would suggest a strong look at Windows Hyper-V, which does just as well hosting Linux guests as it does Windows guests, and fits into a corporate environment, nicely.
In the same big company type-theme, The Azure AD cloud deserves a look. Microsoft has shown a vision of the future in which the cloud acts to orchestrate a mix of cloud and on-premises assets with common active directory.
By considering where the public cloud adds value to a server deployment, and finding savings by bringing some virtual server workloads back on-premises and in-house, enterprises can achieve significant savings that can be re-purposed to other priorities.