To cloud or not to cloud?

To cloud or not to cloud ought to be the most perplexing question for many IT professionals in most industries. Pinning down an option that is cost-effective, durable, and beneficial to the organization can be daunting. Grasping the difference between these two approaches can ease the process of opting for the best option for your business.

On-premise is the traditional approach wherein all resources of your organization such as hardware, applications, and software, are hosted in house. Therefore, the organization purchases its own licenses and server. And deploys support staff for planning and deploying the structure, monitoring, and maintaining these regularly.

Whereas cloud computing is hosting all resources of your organization on the premise of the provider by paying them and assigning them the responsibility of maintaining and monitoring it.

Various factors are to be taken into consideration while deciding the right fit for your organization

Cost:

With on-premise infrastructure, it requires a large upfront cost, and not all organizations of all sizes can opt for this high capital investment. Purchasing license and stack of services and having the manpower resource to maintain it entails a higher cost than on - cloud infrastructure.

Moreover, a lot of thought process goes into this implementation. Planning the entire architecture and implementing it is a prolonged task and when it comes to working; time is money. Additionally, in this method, space and resources are purchased in advance and in the future, if the resources need to scale up or be brought down you would end up over utilizing or under utilizing leading to wastage of time and money.

With cloud infrastructure, it is more of a pay as you go method hence cheaper upfront cost. Decisions can be made as per the current requirement of the organization and should there be a requirement to scale up in the future, that can be done easily. Organizations have the liberty to scale up or down based on the usage, user requirements, and growth of the company and pay only for the units consumed and for the time duration consumed.

Also, once the subscription is activated with the service provider, time spent on installation and configuration can be eliminated and users can access the application right away. This improves productivity and efficiency.

Security:

Certain organizations prefer on-premise infrastructure because they give enormous importance to their data security. With the entire setup and access in the organization’s premises, there definitely exists a great sense of data security than with a cloud computing infrastructure.

For on - cloud infrastructure, data resides at the data center of the service provider and there exists a reliance on them. It usually causes an apprehension in the security of data, and for organizations such as banking industries which are dealing with sensitive data, they might not prefer cloud. Since cloud uses internet, internet related risks are prone to occur. These days cloud computing is reasonably secure, and they follow a strict compliance pattern. However, this decision boils down to the preference of the organization.

Control:

For on – premise infrastructure, organization is accountable for the entire implementation and maintenance, and they possess full control of their data and also ensure regular upkeep of the data center hence enjoy better control. However, this setup consumes a lot of time.

Cloud computing is easier on implementation as everything is readily available at the vendor. Specifying your requirements and choosing the right plan from the vendor can get your application up and running. However, reliance on these providers for data can lead to issues if the cloud provider undergoes any troubles such as downtime. Since these plans are crafted by the vendor, it offers less control over implementation than on-premise, though these days cloud providers are flexible with their plans.

Flexibility:

On-premise has more customization and flexibility as you are free to choose your requirements and all resources are maintained at your end. Gaining access to data is easier in this approach.

Cloud computing providers do provide a lot of choices for organizations, but these choices are vendor specific. But when it comes to retrieving your data, cloud always follows a compliance pattern and your specific requests may not be entertained by cloud providers instantly. Service request patterns must be met to fulfill these requests and customizing certain requests would be unfeasible. Therefore, these compliance and freedom rights should be prudently decided while signing the agreement.

Compliance:

Before choosing a cloud vendor, organization must know the location of the data and ensure that your country laws would support the location of the cloud provider and are in compliance with various regulatory mandates within their industry.

There are trade-offs associated with both options, hence the source for puzzlement is comprehensible. Different organizations have different requirements and their choice principally depends on their requirements and the priority they assign to each of these strengths and weaknesses.

It is also imperative to do thorough research and vetting of the cloud provider before you leap into cloud infrastructure.

Setting down your organization's priorities, weighing the pros and cons of each option, and ascertaining if they are aligned with the priorities can help decide between on-premise or on-cloud. Alternatively, organization could opt for hybrid systems where exclusive usage of one system can be eliminated, instead utilize both cloud and on-premises solutions for specific needs. For instance, organization can choose on -premise for crucial data, while have regular data in a cloud.

Exalogic Consulting has been one of the trusted advisors for leading clients across EM EA, helping and guiding customers make a digital shift into the cloud. To know more, get in touch with our experts at https://www.exalogic.co/contact-us