Cloud or on-premise?

I wanted to share thoughts on a topic that is discussed quite regularly during the initial stages of shaping the technical direction of a business initiative, much like the buy vs build software article I posted last week (https://www.garudax.id/pulse/software-build-in-house-buy-cots-which-correct-answer-daniel-lamont).

Cloud is considered better than on-premise due to its flexibility, reliability and security. Cloud removes the hassle of maintaining and updating systems, allowing you to invest your time, money and resources into fulfilling your core business strategies.

Moving to the cloud can create a host of benefits for companies, including reduction in IT costs, increased efficiency, enhanced security, uplifted performance, and provides the room for innovating and developing new capabilities.

Depending on the needs of a business, there are some instances in which on-premise is more cost effective. And then there are other situations where the cloud is less expensive. However, the majority of organisations will find that cloud computing will cost less than on-premise infrastructure due to the overheads of ongoing maintenance for the hardware and the scale of the teams required to support this.

When considering cloud, there are different types of cloud available. There is public, private and hybrid as well as SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. 

The use of the combinations will depend on your organisations needs and what they plan to use the cloud instance for. 

So, what are the differences between public, private and hybrid cloud ? 

Public cloud 

• Offered by third party provider 
• Available to anyone over public internet 
• Ability to scale quickly 

Private cloud 

• Restricted to selected users / organisations’ private internal network 
• Requires maintenance like a data centre model (you maintain or must have an agreement for support to do so)  
• Provides greater security controls 

Hybrid cloud

• Combination of public and private cloud 
• Shared security responsability
• Provides ability to have tighter controls over sensitive data and processes (Good model for GDPR as an example)

What about SaaS, PaaS, IaaS ? 

SaaS - Software as a Service 

• Use of the software 
• Ability to configure the software
• It is run and managed by the service provider 

PaaS - Platform as a Service 

• Used for developers
• Allows you to deploy your applications and manage your data
• Hardware and OS and all other aspects are managed by the service provider 

IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service

• Provides networking, computers and data storage access 
• You maintain applications, data, runtime, middleware and OS 
• Infrastructure provisioned and maintained by the provider (it’s ultimately an outsourced data center) 

So! how do I know what to pick?

This needs to be a decision that is informed by your organisations tech & business startegy jointly. The tech strategy must have a set of principles, one of which could be cloud first approach. On-prem therefore should not to be investigated (unless all cloud solutions are unsuitable). The business strategy will have a different lens on what it wants to achieve, likely to be a combination of revenue growth, consumer convenience (one click type approach), retention etc. In this type of scenario, I’d be likely to select a combination of private cloud SaaS (assuming a solution exists that fits the business needs) as this gives the organisation the ability to scale easily, reliably and securely. It also supports the customer convenience I mentioned, as it allows you to personalise the digital experience across multiple channels and enables you to build and deploy custom API’s and integration to back-end systems.