In the current scenario, where organizations across industries, be it retail, e-commerce, or b2b, are facing disruptions in business – it has never been more crucial for your enterprise to have a reliable application or website that caters to various demand loads, and availability.

Now, this leads to some key questions – How to host? Where to host? And of course, how much would it cost?

The most obvious choice would be to host your own servers; however, considering the evolution of technology, organizations are now looking towards the Cloud to manage their infrastructure. The Cloud Vision 2020 study from infrastructure monitoring provider LogicMonitor predicted that 95% percent of enterprise workloads would be on the Cloud by 2025, with half of those on public Cloud platforms such as AWS, which still occupies a significant market share compared to the rest of the Cloud service providers.

Even so, the Cloud is relatively new, and some would say many organizations are still on the fence about moving to Cloud. While staying on-premises might initially sound appealing, the advantages of moving your application or workloads to the Cloud make it a compelling choice.

In this blog, we address some pertinent aspects of in-house hosting vs. Cloud. By the time you reach the end of the post, you will be armed with the knowledge that Cloud ultimately is the choice forward for the future. Let us dive right in.

On-Prem vs Cloud
When we talk of installing systems in a physical location equipped with all of the required hardware equipment to handle the IT workloads, we refer to an On-Prem setup. This conventional hosting solution gives a great deal of control, but while there is absolute control, the responsibility to maintain hardware setup, licensing, integration, and assigned people requires heavy investment year after year.

Let us imagine a scenario where we take away the obligation of setting up a data center (therefore eliminating upfront CapEx cost), yet we enjoy the perks of what a physical data center can provide – Looks good, doesn’t it? Well, what we just imagined was Cloud!

Cloud takes away the stress of hardware upgrades and constant refreshes, ensuring availability and scalability.  A 2014 Gartner study calculated the cost of network downtime at $5,600 every minute, which translates to $300K an hour, and that figure can only go higher. With the current state of affairs, it is worth having a Cloud strategy in place to ensure that disruptions to business are ZERO.

Cost Optimization
Another significant factor is the cost, whether it is a hefty upfront cost involved in setting up your own data center or paying for the service consumed.

As mentioned earlier, your own data center’s maintenance cost is an upward climb on a 2-axis graph over time – people, hardware upgrades, refreshes, and licensing, to name a few. While ensuring the costs are kept minimal and do not spiral out of control, you tend to compromise on flexibility in the quest to control your own data center.

On the other hand, Cloud providers like AWS have a myriad of options on how to manage costs on the Cloud. Take, for example, the pay-as-you-go model, where you can decide how long a server/instance be online to serve demand and go offline. With this approach, AWS bills you only for its usage, and even computing workloads can be dynamically managed. Thus, the option to control costs is in the hand of the consumer.

Scalability and Efficiency
While there is an upfront cost involved in setup, hardware refreshes, and upgrades, time is another parameter that must be factored in. Based on the organization process, market supply, and the requirement need, a hardware upgrade takes a considerable amount of time, and that is something that could tip the scales of profit vs. loss.

Advantages with a Cloud service provider are tremendous, for instance, it is easy to set up a blue-green deployment – two identical production environments to reduce downtime and risk, this can be easily achieved by few clicks. Now scaling up and down on infrastructure workloads gives the user the ability to use only what is required to cater to demand.

Reliability, Security, and Compliance
One of the biggest talking points for any traditional business or heavily-regulated industry is how “reliable,” how “secure,” and “compliant” they are towards the industry standards or governing bodies.

And rightly so! These factors must be taken into consideration while drawing up a Cloud strategy, the shared responsibility model that Cloud providers undertake draws boundaries of responsibilities, and that makes it easier to determine and also strengthen/harden the layer you are in control of.

Many well-established Cloud providers have a global footprint, which means disaster recovery sites can be housed in the same geographical zone or another zone. Switchovers to the DR site can also be configured as primary-primary or primary-secondary mode. For instance, AWS uses Cloud Endure Disaster Recovery, while Azure uses Site Recovery Services.

As you can see, Cloud clearly triumphs over on-premises infrastructure.  Due to its flexibility, reliability, and security, Cloud removes the hassle of maintaining and updating systems, allowing you to invest your time, money, and resources into fulfilling your core business strategies. While the Cloud offers many advantages, navigating the choices—such as how much of the security responsibilities you should take on, workloads, cost optimization, applications designed and built for Cloud—can be overwhelming.

How Opteamix can help

Every customer is different and has different requirements that will influence the choice of the deployment strategy. There are a number of questions to ask before finalizing your Cloud vs. on-premise software decision, and that’s where we come in. As a technology consulting firm with deep expertise in Cloud, AI, Robotic Process Automation, Application Development, ITOps, DevOps, Enterprise Mobility, and Test Automation Services, we have extensive experience helping companies migrate to the Cloud. We can determine the right Cloud provider and services for your organization and help you achieve availability, scalability, resilience, and security. Contact us or visit our ITOPs page to know more.