On Premise vs Cloud: pros, cons and differences

Digital transformation is in many ways the era of cloud migration.
Indeed, organizations are grappling with the progressive modernization of their IT infrastructure, and the cloud offers unprecedented opportunities for innovation in this context.
However, although cloud computing services and solutions are an essential resource for businesses, its many benefits also bring with them several critical issues, especially when you have very specific needs or constraints to contend with, both on a technical and regulatory level.
In other words, the cloud is the new benchmark at the IT level, but it is not always the right solution.
Let’s take a look at what on-premise and cloud consist of, what advantages they offer, and especially when it is appropriate to choose a particular IT model, in relation to the needs that arise at the business level.

On Premise Solutions

On-premise refers to an IT infrastructure physically located at the organization’s data center.
On-premise in fact means “on its own premises” and in the IT context refers to a hardware-software infrastructure available locally.
It requires considerable effort in terms of provisioning, management and maintenance, but it is the model that can provide the highest level of control over data and applications.
On-premise coincides for all intents and purposes with traditional IT infrastructure, which everyone referred to before the advent of cloud computing.
However, on-premise models have also evolved, especially in that hybrid IT context that also includes private cloud and on-premise resource availability with a unified, cloud-based management model.

Pros and Cons

On-premise IT infrastructures bring a number of significant benefits in the face of some obvious critical issues.
Among the main benefits, we find:

• Control: the organization integrally has the hardware and software systems that characterize the IT infrastructure and can control in minute detail any aspect related to operation and access.
• Performance: an on-premises infrastructure enjoys particular benefits in terms of reduced latencies, as well as limiting the need for external dependencies.
• Security: being able to govern resources internally brings the security of on-premise systems back to the traditional IT security perimeter.
  The IT department can manage policies for network access with complete autonomy, and this aspect can prove critical if certain contractual or regulatory constraints need to be met regarding data storage and processing.

Among the main critical issues that can arise in the context of an on-premise IT infrastructure:

• Scalability: the main limitation at the on-premise level is due to the fact that it is not possible to vary, beyond certain limits, the availability of resources, as it coincides with the servers and storage systems actually located at the enterprise data center.
• Reliability: IT systems are entirely the responsibility of the in-house team, so ensuring the reliability of the infrastructure can be more complex both in terms of cost and the expertise required.
  In fact, maintenance is one of the biggest burdens in this regard.
• Skills: Local infrastructure requires traditional IT skills, such as hardware and software systems administration, networking and database management, as well as security systems.
  Such skills are beginning to be increasingly difficult to find in an environment increasingly oriented toward cloud and DevOps methodology-based development.
• Security: in the face of a greater level of control over the perimeter, ensuring the security of on-premise systems entails greater burdens and responsibilities for the in-house IT team, with a number of risks arising from possible human errors, starting with those made on configurations.

Costs

In the case of on-premise IT infrastructure, there is a solid initial investment to acquire hadware and software, as well as the installation and configuration work required to make the systems available to users.
In addition to energy consumption, the costs of a data center also include operation and maintenance charges, which are the responsibility of the in-house IT team.
Having the entire hardware and software infrastructure in-house entails a considerable initial investment, to which must be added the objective difficulty in estimating in advance the actual requirements arising from workloads, which vary over time according to business needs.
In contrast, in the medium- to long-term, when resources are successfully amortized, the on-premise model can prove advantageous vis-à-vis the cloud, especially when the orders of magnitude expected from SMB workloads are taken into account.

Cloud Solutions

Cloud computing refers to the provision of computing resources at a third-party provider, which guarantees servers, storage, databases, applications, as well as a range of managed services.
These resources are accessed through the Internet, with solutions that allow corporate clients to pay only for their actual usage, which can be nimbly varied over time.   This is the context otherwise known as the public cloud, where services are managed by managed service providers (MSPs), who make them available to many businesses.
Indeed, the convenience of cloud business is based on the economy of scale, which allows these services to be made available at a lower cost than would result from similar resources available on-premise.

Pros and cons

Cloud computing provides objective advantages from virtualizing IT resources and making them available in an incredibly agile and scalable manner:

• Abstraction: The cloud enables computing, storage and networking to be made available in a fully virtualized manner that is transparent to the end user.
  The abstraction of resources therefore enables a reduction in the burden in terms of skills, time and cost for the internal IT team, as well as facilitating the outsourcing of these processes.
• Security: virtualization of IT resources enables centralized security management to provide a higher level of visibility to cybersecurity systems, moreover, which are easier to control thanks to convenient unified interfaces accessible through a simple Web browser.
• Scalability: In many ways the main strength of cloud computing.
  Administrators, based on a specific computational need, can constantly add and subtract IT resources available in the cloud, reducing waste and consequently containing overall spending.
• Spend control: pricing models based on so-called “pay-as-you-go” allow organizations to avoid the initial investment expected from the on-premise model, as well as actually knowing how much they will spend over a given period of time.
  A quality, the latter, that is very conducive to budgeting.
• Availability: public cloud offerings typically guarantee services with guarantees of high availability (high availability), with rapid provisioning, as well as vertical or horizontal scalability, depending on business needs.

Instead, among the main critical issues to be overcome in the context of cloud adoption we find:

• Control: Systems management operated by a third-party provider ensures high levels of reliability at the frond of lower overall charges.
  The price to pay, however, is often characterized by limited control and less ability to customize services, especially in the case of the public cloud.
• Performance: cloud services can lead to latency issues vis-à-vis on-premises applications due to the bottlenecks present on the Internet network, as well as the connectivity technologies used.
  This is particularly critical when cloud-based elements are added to a traditional infrastructure that was not originally designed to integrate services available outside the enterprise perimeter.
• Complexity: the large offering of cloud services and solutions leads the various lines of business to make an increasing number of contracts with different providers.
  This can generate objective management difficulties for the internal IT team, which has to resort to specific solutions to obtain the necessary visibility of the services adopted by the company in a multicloud and hybrid cloud context.
  This complexity is also reflected in terms of the skills needed for cloud management.
• Lock-in: major cloud ecosystems involve proprietary technologies and solutions, especially in the case of so-called hyperscalers (AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, etc.) which can give rise to a possible dependency (lock-in) when deploying their own applications.
  This aspect emerges especially not so much in the development phase, but in the subsequent maintenance, should the provider unilaterally change some technological or contractual conditions, as well as increase prices.

Costs

One of the main revolutions introduced by cloud computing revolves around the possibility of not facing any initial investment in terms of IT infrastructure, as well as the fact that it almost completely exempts the in-house team from the burdens related to the maintenance and upkeep of systems and applications.
In other words, taking advantage of cloud services to obtain computing, storage, and networking resources, as well as the entire application compartment, allows corporate clients to have systems that are always up-to-date in terms of performance, security, and reliability, with all the procurement and management burdens borne by the provider.

On Premise or Cloud?
How to Choose

Choosing between an on-premise solution and a cloud service is a frequent situation in the context of digital transformation of organizations.
In this regard, a necessary premise is appropriate.
It is increasingly rare to observe infrastructures that are entirely on-premise rather than cloud-based.
The most recurrent reality is hybrid IT infrastructures, consisting of varying shares of public cloud (multicloud), private cloud and on-premise.
This is a condition that is often associated with objective complexity at the management level, which can be solved by targeted consulting and increasingly mature management platforms to ensure proper visibility of systems, data and applications deployed across IT environments. There are many general criteria to guide IT-level choices.
Public cloud computing services offer high scalability, costs based on what you actually use, and constant availability of applications based on emerging technologies, such as AI/ML, blockchain, and real time analytics.
The on-premise model, at least in its most generic definition, offers greater security, simpler governance, greater visibility relative to data location, as well as lower latency.
On a purely guiding level, when asking where to direct one’s preference regarding cloud and on-premise, an initial checklist might focus on the following questions:

• What level of control do I need over the data and applications?
• What are the cost trade-offs?
• What level of data security and protection do I need to ensure?
• What IT skills do I have internally?

If you would like to pursue your evaluations with us, please contact us and we will be available to study the best evolution for your IT.