With the increasing adoption of cloud solutions, many organisations are asking what the difference is between cloud and on-premise IT and what is best option for my business? This guide shows a comparison of cloud vs on premise with a focus on security and cost.
When thinking about the differences between an on-premises IT infrastructure compared to cloud, it’s first important to think about what we mean by the environment. Depending on the business this could be at one-site or multiple and could consist of a range of hardware and software including servers, computers or databases.
So, in simple terms, difference between on-premise and cloud is essentially where your hardware, application and software reside. On-premise means that a company keeps all of this IT infrastructure onsite, which is either managed by themselves or a third-party. With the Cloud it means that it is housed offsite with someone else responsible for monitoring and maintaining it.
Due to its flexibility, reliability and security, cloud can remove the burden of a business having to maintain and upgrade their own systems, which enables them to invest their time and money into concentrating on their core business strategies. The sections below compare the different cloud setups and highlight the advantages and disadvantages of both.
With on-premises infrastructure all services are run, managed and maintained from within the business on their own hardware and servers. Some businesses may choose to do this for compliance or security reasons, although often find it’s more expensive and offers less flexibility.
Cloud services provided by global businesses such IONOS give businesses the power of enterprise level infrastructure at a fraction of the costs. Benefits such as per minute consumption-based billing benefits businesses that only want to pay for data and services when they use them.
Whilst your data and hardware are kept in the cloud, it is completely private to your organisation, sitting on dedicated infrastructure that is entirely owned by you. A dedicated leased line into a Private Cloud is fully replicated, provides complete security.
A fully managed, multi-tenanted cloud solution that provides businesses with a high performance, reliability and scalability. It takes the complexity out of managing your own infrastructure and provides the perfect blend of public and private cloud.
With hybrid cloud a business uses a combination of on-premise and cloud infrastructure. There are a range of reasons that a business may choose to do this, from compliance issues, to the size of the data they are dealing with.
Believe it or not, the basics of the cloud and the differences between on-premise, infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-as-service (SaaS) can be explained by using the example of making a pizza.
In each scenario you’re still having pizza, however in some cases your business takes responsibility and expense for managing all elements of the process, whilst in the latter you let a specialist do the work for you. What’s pizza got to do with IT you may ask?
The benefit of the ‘dining out’ model or SaaS is that your business outsources the entire process to a specialist provider who takes responsibility for everything, including the upfront cost of purchasing the infrastructure, maintaining the equipment, storage, security and running a team of specialists.