Choose between cloud hosting and on-premises data centers. Consider scalability, cost, security, and more. Make the right infrastructure decision.
Your business relies on servers to deliver content, applications, and services to employees, customers, and even your supply chain. When deploying these servers, you have several options, but the two most popular are through cloud hosting or an on-premises data center.
This choice can be challenging because both have their advantages and disadvantages. You may not realize this, but making the right choice from the beginning can mean the difference between the success and failure of a project.
You may not realize this, but even cloud development can be centered on a cloud host or an on-premises data center. In fact, all types of implementations can be deployed on any platform, such as ERP solutions, React projects, pharmacy management software, retail software, and CRM tools.
Therefore, when you are looking to start a new deployment or project, one of the first questions you should ask is: “Should this be deployed through cloud hosting or an on-premises data center?” The answer to this question will help define the rest of the project.
But which is the right option for your company?
Let's break this down into the most important categories for business-level deployments so you can make your decision easily.
Scalability
This is probably one of the first considerations you should make when choosing between a third-party cloud host and an on-premises data center. Scalability is how your service handles increasing demand. Your business may be small at first, but you know it will grow. Your business needs to grow if you plan to stay in business.
If there's one aspect of the debate that heavily favors third-party cloud hosting, it's scalability. As your business grows, your servers will have to meet the demands of more and more customers/clients.
In an on-premises data center, you meet this demand by purchasing larger, more powerful servers (which can be expensive) or by clustering multiple servers (which can be time-consuming and challenging). With a third-party cloud host, scaling to meet demand can be as simple as assigning more resources to a service. You can even create a service that automatically scales up or down based on need.
If you know your business will be hit with high demand in the near future, a third-party cloud host is your best option. If you go the on-premises route, knowing you will see massive demands, make sure the service is deployed on a server (or cluster of servers) capable of handling the growing needs. Otherwise, your IT department may struggle to keep servers and services running.
Security
This one is a little tricky. Firstly, if you opt for a cloud host, your company data (customer and client) will be hosted on a third-party server. Is this data sensitive in nature? If so, is it sensitive enough that you don't want (or can't allow) third-party hosting? If that's the case, you have your answer: your services should remain in-house.
If this is a gray area, you should consider:
- Is your IT department prepared to protect this data internally?
- How much do you trust the security of your third-party cloud provider?
- Do you trust your developers to create applications that are secure enough to be hosted on a third-party cloud provider?
- Does your cloud host allow you to configure security for your deployments, or are you limited to the standard offerings?
- Does your third-party cloud host offer any security guarantees?
Answer the questions above and the decision will become obvious to you.
Cost benefit
Another complicated question. We've already mentioned the cost-effectiveness of using a third-party cloud provider. However, there is a skeleton in that particular closet. Consider this:
Your cloud-native development team has created a containerized service to be deployed on your cloud host and ensured that it is perfectly optimized to scale with demand. The service is deployed and everything works fine. Out of nowhere, you start to see your cloud hosting bill skyrocket. Why? Your software engineers may have optimized this deployment with performance in mind. Because of this, the service may use an exorbitant number of CPUs or network objects.
This means you are spending a lot more money than necessary.
Deploying at scale is incredibly challenging when cost is taken into account. You need developers who are capable of optimizing countless moving parts in these manifests. This is a big challenge.
If this same service is deployed on a capable local server, it can consume as much CPU and network bandwidth as desired. As long as your server and LAN can keep up with the demand, you won't be hit with a huge bill.
To control
How much control do you want to have over servers, services, networking, security, and deployments? If you (or your business) need a high level of control, a third-party cloud host is not for you. If control is important, an in-house data center may be the only option that fits your needs.
With a cloud host, you may encounter many limitations on what you can do. You may be limited to using your deployment tools, operating systems, or authentication protocols. With an in-house data center, it's all up to you; you have full control over everything.
Remember this: with a cloud host, you don't own the hardware, so you're forever limited to what you can do. With an on-premises data center, you own everything and are free to do whatever you want or need.
Data recovery
Finally, we come to another critical issue that will weigh on this decision. The biggest problem with cloud hosts and data recovery is that you depend on them and the cost of data recovery can get expensive.
Of course, with an on-premises data center, data recovery will depend on whether or not your IT team has set up a reliable backup solution. If your administrators have developed a disaster recovery plan (which can range from bare metal to a running server), you can be confident that data recovery can be fast, complete, and inexpensive.
If, however, your IT team is unable to develop such a plan, a third-party cloud host may be your best option. Sure, data recovery can be expensive, but at least it will be reliable.
Conclusion
Take all these questions and compare them. What is more important: scalability, security, cost, control or data recovery? Once you know the answer to this, you can make your decision quite easily.
Of course, it will not be a matter of one issue outweighing the others enough to facilitate this choice. To do this, you can rank the options from least to most important. Once you do this, you should be able to complete it quite easily. No matter how you arrive at this decision, just make sure you do it before you get too far into planning your project.
Source: BairesDev
