Cloud Computing Vs On-Premises
This article explains differences between cloud computing and on-premises models, and why cloud is becoming the preferred choice. Once you understand this, you can better decide what would work better for you.
1. Cost:
On-Premises:
If you are a startup then you need to purchase expensive servers to start and support your business. You would have to pay upfront cost to purchase servers.
If you are an established organization, then there is a constant need to upgrade the infrastructure to support the business operations. All this costs a lot of money, and you have to pay this cost upfront.
Cloud:
With cloud, either you don’t have to pay any upfront cost or have to pay very limited upfront cost to get cloud based servers and other resources. You can start using the resources and then you pay the cloud service provider on pay-per-use basis. And at some point, if you don’t need the equipment anymore, you don’t need to worry what to do with that, just stop using it. Cloud saves a lot of your upfront cost.
2. Scalability:
Scalability is ability to increase or decrease infrastructure resources to handle the changing demand of your software and services.
On-Premises:
In traditional on-premises hosting, you can not scale your infrastructure quickly. If you have more demand for your software and services during a particular time of the day, and your current infrastructure is unable to handle that demand, then you have to purchase more servers and related equipment. It would take you time procuring the equipment, installing it and making it up and running. On top of all of this, the equipment would just be helpful during peak hours. When the peak spike passes, equipment would be idle, which is not effective use of your resources. And you have already spent your money on procuring the equipment.
Cloud:
In cloud, if your infrastructure demands grows, you can do that quickly. You don’t need to wait for infrastructure procurement and spending upfront cost on that. You can spin up new servers, scale up existing infrastructure, like memory/cpu/storage e.t.c, within minutes without spending upfront cost. You would just have to pay for the scaled up resources for the duration that you use them for. When it’s not the peak time, you can schedule them to scale down automatically and can save your cost. So cloud comes with scalability, fast implementation and effective cost management.
3. Availability:
Availability means that your software and services are available for your users with no interruption.
On-Premises:
In traditional on-premises hosting, it takes efforts and considerable cost to provide highly available system with reliable failover. If you want to make your system highly available, and want a reliable failover then you need at least two geographically separated locations where you may host your infrastructure. So you would have to spend upfront cost for procurement setup and then manage two separate locations.
Cloud:
In cloud, all major cloud service providers have a large number of data centers across the world in different geographical locations called regions and availability zones (AZ). So you can easily use more than one availability zones and host your infrastructures there. It is easy for your team to remotely access and manage these geographically separated AZ at any time.
4. Reliability:
What is the frequency of component failure for your equipment? Is your system reliable and available when required? That’s a big question.
On-Premises:
In on-premises model, it’s really hard for you to make sure that all the different components of your infrastructure are working properly and won’t fail. You have to do continuous monitoring and replace components proactively if you find performance is being compromised. That takes time, efforts from your team, and costs you money.
Cloud:
In cloud, cloud service providers have enormous resources and highly skilled teams who keep monitoring and enhancing their systems making sure to achieve reliability. Cloud provider offer service level agreements guaranteeing you for the infrastructure reliability. So you can achieve reliability of your services in cloud easily without paying any additional cost.
5. Security:
Security means protecting your infrastructure, applications, and related data from cyber threats. There are two type of securities that apply to both on-premises and cloud models.
a. Infrastructure Security:
Infrastructure security means securing the Infrastructure so that the equipment can’t be physically accessed by un-authorized personnel.
It also includes proper configuration and timely patching of equipment and network.
b. Application Security:
Application security means managing application users, their access levels, application data encryption and any regulatory requirements (compliance).
On Premises Model:
In on-premises model, both Infrastructure Security and Application Security are your responsibility. You need trained teams, resources, proper software and their licensing to handle this level of security.
Cloud Model:
In cloud model, security is a “shared responsibility”. Cloud service provider is responsible for the Infrastructure Security of the physical hosts on which the compute instances run and the storage resides. You as a customer are responsible for Application Security.
I hope you have a basic understanding of on-premises and cloud computing differences. You can better decide which one works best for you.
