On-premise infrastructure – More control with less flexibility.
On-premise infrastructure is a physical infrastructure located on your site that you are responsible for managing and maintaining. The biggest benefit? It’s far less expensive. You also have total control over your infrastructure, data, and security. For example, the solutions deployed locally, on-site, behind your firewall benefit from your organisation’s array of security measures,
but if you want to change anything, you’ll need to provision the necessary resources yourself. A fully on-prem infrastructure is therefore less expensive and gives you more control, but is also more labour-intensive and less flexible.
Why more and more data is in the cloud.The cloud has revolutionised the way end users access their data and applications and enterprises are moving an increasing number of apps from their local servers to the cloud. But the term cloud is one that can sometimes cause confusion. In actual fact, it’s nothing more than a way of referring to an external location where you can store your infrastructure. |
Cloud infrastructure – Less control for more flexibility.
The main difference between an infrastructure hosted in the cloud and one on-site is in the flexibility and ability to evolve. An infrastructure located in the cloud is easier to scale up or down. You don’t have to conduct analyses yourself and simply purchase the capacity you actually need.
This sounds perfect, of course, but the big downside is that it’s much more expensive. Moreover, you only have a limited amount of control over your data infrastructure. You are essentially at the beck and call of the service provider’s encryption and data policy.
The best of both worlds – A hybrid solution.
Both options have advantages and disadvantages. The cloud is a way of outsourcing hosting that presents certain advantages, but is also often very pricey, not to mention offering you less control, while an on-site data centre is more static and often not agile enough.
Luckily, we can benefit from the advantages of both solutions in a hybrid data centre that combines the flexibility of the cloud with a total cost of ownership that’s lower than on-site. You also have more control over your data security. By creating a smart mix of a physical data centre and a flexible cloud environment, you end up with a data centre that best fits your company’s needs.