Background: I consult extensively in the SaaS space and ask people this question all the time in the course of strategy reassessments, transactional diligence, etc.
1. Physical control over data is still a premium for many professional investors. As a hedge fund CIO told me recently when I asked her why she was so anti-cloud migration, "I want our data to live on our servers in our building behind our security guard and I want our lawyer, not AWS's, to read the subpoena if the SEC ever comes for us."
2. There are a lot of niche ERP- and CRM-adjacent platforms out there -- e.g., medical imaging software -- where the best providers are still on-prem focused, so customers in that space are waiting for the software to catch up before they switch.
3. A lot of people still fundamentally don't trust the security of the cloud. And I'd say this distrust isn't of the tinfoil hat, "I don't believe SSL really works" variety that existed a decade ago. Instead it's, "we'd have to transition to a completely different SysAdmin environment and we'd probably fuck up an integration and inadvertently cause some kind of horrendous breach".
1. Physical control over data is still a premium for many professional investors. As a hedge fund CIO told me recently when I asked her why she was so anti-cloud migration, "I want our data to live on our servers in our building behind our security guard and I want our lawyer, not AWS's, to read the subpoena if the SEC ever comes for us."
2. There are a lot of niche ERP- and CRM-adjacent platforms out there -- e.g., medical imaging software -- where the best providers are still on-prem focused, so customers in that space are waiting for the software to catch up before they switch.
3. A lot of people still fundamentally don't trust the security of the cloud. And I'd say this distrust isn't of the tinfoil hat, "I don't believe SSL really works" variety that existed a decade ago. Instead it's, "we'd have to transition to a completely different SysAdmin environment and we'd probably fuck up an integration and inadvertently cause some kind of horrendous breach".