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Can a Premise solution truly give me better performance over Cloud based?

On-premise offerings

On-premises solutions, sometimes shortened to “on-prem,” are those that are deployed in the traditional manner. Servers are acquired, operating systems are installed, other hardware may be involved, but all of that lives within your four walls, or the walls of your datacenter. You can reach out and touch on-prem solutions. You’re responsible for them, to at least some degree. You might virtualize the servers, but the physical hosts are still there. You might outsource management to a service integrator, but you still provide the physical security, the electricity, and the balance sheet entries to carry the assets. You might have the hardware in a cage within a shared datacenter or hosting facility, but they are still tangible, physical assets for which you are responsible.

Which is best?

Like so many IT questions, the answer is “it depends,”and what it depends on is largely dependent upon a number of things about your company. If you have the necessary expertise on staff, and sufficient resources to provision what is required, then you may want to keep it on-prem. If you have trust issues, or very unique compliance requirements, you may want to keep it on-prem. Be careful with that one though, as you may find that a cloud provider can meet your security and compliance requirements better than you can, and for less cost! If you don’t have and can’t afford the expertise on staff to maintain something, cloud based offerings should be very appealing. If you need global presence, 24x7x365 support, or extreme scale, cloud based offerings may be the only realistic way to get there for a business. Let’s look at some specific things you should consider when evaluating whether to do something on-prem or move it to the cloud.

The Hybrid Approach

There’s no reason to think the choice between on-prem and cloud is a mutually exclusive one. Customers can pick and choose what works best for them. Maybe you want to keep your email system on-prem, but leverage a cloud-based service for message hygiene, continuity or archiving. Or perhaps you will deploy your domain controllers and file and print servers on-prem, but build application and database servers in the cloud using an Infrastructure as a service provider who can provide you with computing resources for far less than you can do on your own. Enterprises may want to deploy all their production systems on-prem, but can leverage cloud services for lab or QA purposes to easily and cost-effectively spin up systems for testing. Whether you are more inclined to favor on-premises solutions or cloud-based solutions, don’t assume you have to choose one to the exclusion of the other. There are times where both may be the better choice, depending on circumstance the right choice is up to you. The one thing to keep in mind is that on-prem solutions may represent large capital investments, but cloud-based solutions may represent long-term subscription contracts. Weigh each option carefully, focus on doing what you do well with your existing staff first, and then look at if it makes sense to float away to the cloud!