A few years back, the idea of asking whether a workload should be placed in the cloud or on-premise might’ve been scoffed at. Of course it should go into the cloud, why wouldn’t it? Everything should go in the cloud.

The cloud has become the go-to mode of delivery, so ubiquitous that perhaps it can be easy to wonder what the future looks like for on-site cloud solutions. Despite the cloud’s position in re-engineering how businesses think and operate, there’s still a lot of value in on-premise deployments that shouldn’t be overlooked. In this post, we’ll be looking at the on-premise vs cloud debate and, perhaps most importantly, the state of play surrounding this in 2019.

On-premise vs cloud pros and cons

There are many well-worn arguments rolled out when it comes to the cloud including scalability, the reduction in physical management, CAPEX vs OPEX, the ability to easily bolt on additional services (such as DR and backup) and so on.

However, for all the benefits the cloud offers, there are whole swathes of businesses yet to dip their toe into this world for a range of reasons including
Organisational approaches to security;
Apprehension to physically part with workloads;
Worries around migration or refactoring/ replatforming applications;
Struggles to find the right solution/ provider;
Resistance to change.

Cloud maturity, multi-cloud and on-premise cloud

For those companies who have embraced the cloud, it’s no longer a new thing. It’s the new normal and it continues to mature rapidly with improved tooling, better integration and increased options. Businesses also have much more knowledge on their side about the cloud, and specifically how the cloud does (and doesn’t) work for them.

After several years of focus on migrating to the cloud, there are a range of solutions on the market (like our Converged Cloud Stack) that bring cloud benefits on-premise, utilising physical hardware and the security this offers. For some time, the message from the big public cloud providers has been that, one day, all workloads will be migrated to the public cloud.

There have been various case studies that have been used to suggest this, from Netflix operating entirely on the public cloud, the NHS allowing public cloud usage and solutions (such as AWS Govcloud) built to meet the strict requirements of the most security-conscious bodies.

However, the growth in cloud on-prem solutions may mean that the on-premise vs cloud debate may finally be coming to an end. If an organisation can comfortably have core workloads hosted on a cloud platform (self-managed or managed by a provider) and then specialist workloads hosted on certain sites where required around the world, there’s no longer a need to decide between cloud and on-premise.

This has the potential to make cloud environments more complicated, with enterprises having less reason to put all of their metaphorical eggs in one basket. It may also mean that enterprises who’ve been put off the idea of migrating to the cloud have a first step, involving the cloud on-prem, to get off the ground.

As network teams get comfortable asking more of their infrastructure while the wider business feels more confident about hosting workloads in different locations, the question becomes less about one hosting method or another and more about how they effectively consume and manage resource across a distributed environment.

Are you currently deciding between a cloud vs an on-premise solution? Could you do with some free, helpful advice to help you make the right decision? Get in touch with us today to arrange a free chat with one of our cloud experts.