Key Differences: On-Premise Enterprise IT Environments vs. Public Cloud

Many companies are hesitant to make the leap into the cloud and prefer to rely on their legacy and on-premise applications and software to do business. On-Premise resources are considered more reliable and secure, offering enterprises more ‘direct’ control than on cloud. However, this is slowly changing. IT decision-makers are realizing that they need to leverage the flexibility, scalability and cost-savings offered by the cloud in order to achieve their business goals.

In this Cloud era, CIOs are looking for the best strategy to increase business adaptability, accelerate processes and foster innovation, while keeping costs under control. Simply moving everything to the Cloud is not the answer, as it may backfire and actually increase costs without delivering the expected results. Other companies are adopting a ‘Cloud-First’ approach where any new projects or deployments are targeted at the cloud. However, this means that they are not gaining the full advantage offered by the Cloud.

Key Differences between On-Premise and Cloud

When it comes to choosing the best strategy for your business, one needs to understand key differences between On-Premise and Cloud environments so that one can make an informed choice depending on specific needs and requirements.

Management

In an on-premise environment, resources are deployed within an enterprise’s IT infrastructure. The internal IT team is responsible for maintaining the infrastructure.

In a public cloud environment, resources are hosted by the service provider, but enterprises are able to access those resources. It is focused on self-service and software-defined control via APIs and web portals.

Control

With on-premise environments, the company retains all their data and is fully in control of what happens to it. However, this means that they are solely responsible for its security and maintenance, which comes with added infrastructure and manpower costs.

In cloud-hosting, data resides within your cloud provider’s infrastructure, providing the enterprise full access to the data. Although there is a chance of outage, Cloud providers, leveraging their scale, usually offer 99.99% availability of the resources and therevy reduce downtime .

Cost

Hosting an on-premise application involves capital expenditure due to dedicated hardware and data centres. Not to mention space, power and other resource costs.

Cloud providers usually offer an on-demand pricing model where the enterprise needs to pay only for the resources they use with none of the maintenance costs.

Security & Compliance

Entities such as the Government, Financial service sector that deal with highly sensitive information, require controllable & accountable level security that is provided by on-premise environments. Despite the costs involved, regulatory concerns justify such investments in their own infrastructure.

Although Cloud providers have implemented strict security protocols, data security and privacy concerns remain one of the major barriers for enterprises to embrace cloud infrastructure. Compliance is another area where companies choosing to place their applications on the cloud need to do their due-diligence and ensure that proper security and compliance protocols are in place.

Hybrid Cloud

Owing to these factors, many companies are opting for a hybrid approach. The Hybrid approach features a mix of different IT deployment models: on-premise to private cloud to public cloud. The hybrid approach offers the best of both worlds with each application workload running in the environment that best addresses both application needs and business requirements.

Working with Cloud Kinetics

Most enterprises have many traditional applications running on-premise. There may be reasons due to which you wish to move some of them to the cloud. However, this decision needs careful analysis of your applications and your business. Cloud Kinetics can accelerate your cloud adoption by leveraging the power and flexibility of cloud to achieve meaningful business results.

Tags: Business on Cloud Business Transformation Digital Transformation