On-premise, Cloud or Hybrid?
Digital enterprise deployments has become a vital factor for the successful digital transformation journey in any organization. With the increasing number of innovative cloud technologies, it is not a single or few options anymore to select from. Instead, there are hundreds of technologies can be used in development, deployments and CI/CD implementations. It has become more complex with the use of cloud based platforms and environments for deployments where it gives better user experience as well as cost benefits for the organization.
Even though the usage of cloud technologies rapidly grows, there are still some concerns in many organizations for cloud migrations due to various different reasons. Therefore it is worth looking at what are the limitations and advantages of different types of deployments. It will help to understand the best deployment option for your solution.
On-premise deployments
From the good old days when the internet was introduced, every organization had their own physical data centers (or rented spaces from third party data centers), with full of servers, routers, racks, cables, VPNs, power backups and many other hardware devices which are required for reliable communication and operation of the software solutions. Those were maintained by specialized personnel who had the expertise in hardware maintenance as well as software installation and housekeeping activities. Also the place where these hardware is setup, should be highly secured, protected from natural disasters and always equipped with backup power to withstand against power failures.
With all of these requirements, it is worth checking why people still require to have on-premise deployments. The main reason is the restrictions applied through various types of regulations, not only within the organization, but also some other regulatory bodies which involve with the business of the organization. Typical example is the banking and financial sector. Banks and financial institutes deal with people’s financial data which is an extremely sensitive information. Therefore there are some regulations applied on these data, which restricts it being stored in remote places other than bank’s physical location (or any other recommended venue). These types of regulations limits such organization’s requirement of moving away from on-premise deployments.
Following figure shows how a typical on-premise deployment looks like.
Organizations use on-premise data centers due to various reasons;
- Fully owned and managed by the organization and therefore they can have their own management process
- Supports rules and regulations applied on the solution specially on security of information
- Easy to apply changes to the infrastructure because the total control over the system is with the organization itself
However, on-premise data centers have their own disadvantages as well;
- Organization should manage the physical and human resources required for the deployment
- Internal resources should have the competencies to manage both the hardware and software
- 24x7 availability is required from the maintenance staff
- Organization should bare the cost of maintaining fail-over/Disaster Recovery(DR) sites for mission critical applications
- Power backups, data backups and other recovery options should be established and maintained by the organization itself
Cloud Deployments
With the start of the 21st century, there was massive hike on cloud computing and related technologies. As a result of that, Amazon launched their cloud platform which still dominates in the public cloud adoption with 61% of current usage while the other two main competitors Azure and Google holds 52% and 19% respectively.
Many organizations are moving to cloud based deployments from on-premise deployments due to various reasons. Top reasons for being moved into cloud deployments are;
- No major capital investment
- Pay as you go like plans give flexible maintenance cost options
- Massively set of infrastructure build options suits to individual’s needs with lot of customization
- Online training materials provide faster on boarding of the teams and staff
- Organization can use their staff for more productive work while handing over the overhead of infrastructure maintenance to the cloud providers
It is obvious that Cloud Deployments and Infrastructure has few disadvantages for some organizations due to the nature of the business their involved in.
- Most of the existing users of the systems are established with their existing data centers which cost them massive amount of money move their secure applications to cloud
- Regulations on security and data privacy does not allow to move their systems to cloud
- Cultural influence which prevents them to lose their control on infrastructure to a third party
- Lack of competency on cloud technologies within their staff who are reluctant to change
Some of these reasons are more realistic scenarios in the modern world than valid reasons. Any strategic decision maker within the organization will face these whenever they try to change the deployment from on-premise to cloud.
Private cloud option will opt out some of these factors such as data privacy, although others like connectivity migration costs will remain the same.
Hybrid Cloud Deployment
Many organizations have these issues to moving to public cloud and therefore the usage of hybrid cloud is far ahead in the game compared to the public cloud usage in 2019. This is the option used by most of the large enterprises according to the below statistics.
Keeping in mind that the cloud is the future of IT infrastructure, hybrid deployment would provide most of the solutions for the problems discussed in previous sections. Hybrid deployment keeps your most secure, regulatory and mostly back-office solutions within on-premise and moves all client facing, more open interfaces to private or public cloud. It will ensure data privacy and regulations are followed properly while providing external connectivity to a flexible, highly available and more cost effective infrastructure in the cloud. Also it will allow users to connect to your applications with less effort and with higher efficiency because of the massive set of infrastructure support provided by the cloud.
Even a hybrid solution will give some level of inefficiency related to the geographical location where the cloud servers are hosted and your on-premise servers reside. The latency with your back office and front facing applications will give long term disadvantages.
Which option to choose?
There is no doubt that cloud infrastructure and deployment options provide more flexible, reliable and cost effective solutions and further improving competitively day by day. There will be many cloud providers in future who provides more advanced solutions to overcome any challenges in current solutions.
However, cloud solutions will not be the right solution to host your applications straightaway. If the organization is running extremely stable own infrastructure on-premise with many talented resources, it will not get immediate advantage when moving to cloud. The best options for such organization is to be more opportunistic and start moving to cloud solutions with the earliest opportunity and gradually move old applications to the same cloud infrastructure.
If the organization is just starting development with completely new set of applications, cloud deployment is the best solution. It will avoid any migration overhead in future and start getting real benefits of the cloud right from the beginning. However, selecting the correct cloud provider is a crucial decision. It should align with your all security and privacy requirements while providing quality service and production support. It is always encouraged to evaluate multiple cloud providers and decide the best one with proper criteria rather than going for the most cost effective provider thinking only about the money.
Selecting the right solutions depends on the strategic vision, budget and other inherited constraints within the organization as well. All the above facts to be carefully analysed and select the best option which provides more benefits to the organization in the long run.
