Many of business technology solutions are available today for your IT infrastructure. This makes choosing the right solution rather challenging. Ultimately you will need to select the IT plan that meets with your business model. Your business IT solution can be implemented in several different ways. The three most common options are on-premise, cloud, and hybrid cloud.
On-premise
With an on-premise solution, your applications, data, and servers are hosted at your business’s physical location or at a data center (co-location). It basically means that the server management, maintenance, system upgrades, hardware equipment, electrical power, cooling system, and internet carrier are on the responsibility of the company where the servers themselves are hosted. It is also important to remember that security and access to data is your company’s responsibility as well, as you are maintaining the security internally.
Cloud
Cloud solution, on the other hand, is accessed via the internet and typically hosted by a third-party vendor. Your company’s application and data are stored in the cloud service provider’s data center. If your company housed the business applications and data at your co-location in a data center, the server management responsibility remains with you or with an outsourced IT provider. The electricity and bandwidth costs also remain with you. Meanwhile with cloud solution, your cloud service provider manages all the maintenance, security, bandwidth, data center overheads and hardware. It removes the need for your company to invest on hardware technology and skills.
Hybrid Cloud
For some companies, adopting hybrid cloud solution meets their business models by taking advantage of both on-premises and cloud infrastructure benefits. Hybrid cloud solution offers the scalability and flexibility to allow your company to shift between the two infrastructures when capacity, business models and costs change. For example, your company can opt to keep your most important data in on-premise servers to retain full control, while less critical data hosted in the cloud. Like most important parts of your company’s IT infrastructure, you must have the technology in place to allow for on-premise and the cloud to connect and interact effectively.
As you can see, there is no simple answer to which IT solution is best for your business. It is likely that on-premise solution fits your business model if you have sufficient internal resources available. If your business grows very rapidly with new market and territories, then you are likely to find flexibility and scalability of cloud solution model works best for your company. The third hybrid solution option that many companies selected, it provides a cost-effective to keep sensitive data in-house while relaying on the cloud for the rest. In the end, it ultimately depends entirely on your company unique needs and business model.
