The world of IT was entirely disrupted by new technologies. One of these changes refers to hosting and developing software on premise or in the cloud. In this article we provide a brief comparative explanation of these two technologies to highlight their pros and cons.
Rapidly changing of technology leads to having numerous options for companies to choose their infrastructure and run their applications and software. Available options are on premise and cloud that each has its own pros and cons.
Indeed, this is not an easy decision to migrate into the cloud or stay on premise as it depends on many factors. For some companies reliability of trusted legacy software is on priority and for others agility.
On below, you will find a brief explanation of both on premise and cloud to find out their differentiations.
On Premise
Whether a company places its applications in the cloud or decides to keep them in the premises, data security is always important. Well, knowing this matter that whole of data are stored within hosted servers entirely, provide a great peace of mind. This is what on premise offers as its main advantage.
According to on premise, companies are required to manage and maintain their servers internally, especially when backups and upgrades are being performed.
Choosing between on premise and cloud depends on operating sector. For instance, if a company is active in highly regulated industries and working with critical or confidential data, then on premise is the best option because data security is on high priority. This is why most of companies have operated on premise: they simply want to keep all sensitive data secure within their in-house servers.
On the other hand and the rest of on premise features could be considered as its disadvantages, too.
For instance, updates and patches for software usually release once when required. This causes less scalability for the on premise providers as they are required to invest more on their IT infrastructures.
Moreover, maintaining servers required more technical deployment and investment as on premise providers should take it into account.
Additionally, while continuous subscription fees are vague in software business nowadays, on premise providers are responsible for all ongoing expenses which would be caused during data security process, maintaining hardware and software, replacing servers and so on.
Cloud Computing
While in on premise, a company hosts everything in-house, in a cloud computing conversely all hosted by third parties. This enables companies to decrease their costs and easily scaling up their products based on their company’s growth.
Under this scheme, all responsibilities of updating, backing up, data integrity, maintaining server infrastructure and security matters are shifted to third parties which cuts high costs for software vendors.
Unlike on premise model, the cloud allows software vendors to scale faster with a high degree of integrated functionality. Furthermore as there is no need to any on-site infrastructures then the deployment is less expensive, simpler and much faster.
Which one is right for my business?
As it was discussed there is no right or wrong approach to choose between on premise and cloud. Hence, answering to this question is impossible. Each company is unique and has unique requirements which will affect the implementation strategy’s choice. Before choose one of these two methods, pros and cons of them for your project should be analyzed. We at AO-ITC are always beside you to help for making the right decision.