A Comparison between On-Premises and Hosted Cloud Solutions

The hosted cloud solution provides a nice alternate to the business organizations which have previously relied upon solutions. However, before you make the choice of entirely switching to cloud based option, you need to understand what you are getting into. This blog post compares the two options. There are many aspects that need to be considered including costs, maintenance, recovering from a data disaster and other related factors. Here is a look at the different options.

  Capital Expenditure

When you are talking about the hosted solution, it costs a lot less. You do not need to procure any hardware equipment in order to get things going. The only equipment that you would need is the phones. On the other hand, when you want on-premises solution, you need to have huge capital investments. There can be many things that you need to add to get everything on your business premises including hardware, phone, power, and rack spaces etc.

  Cost of Installation

When you are depending on the hosted cloud solution, you do not need to invest in any installations. As everything is hosted in the cloud, there is no physical infrastructure to take care of. On the other hand, when you are looking for premises based solution, you need to have the equipment and everything else related to it installed. And as the size of the network grows, you have to pay more money for the installation, which is usually sunk cost.

  The Migration

When you have hosted cloud solution, you will always be upgraded with the new features that are made available by the service provider. These value added features would help you improve the existing communication systems as well as add new functionality. But when you want to have new features for on-premises solution, you usually need a major overhaul of your existing infrastructure. This change in infrastructure can create a lot of problems like downtime, networking related issues, and a lot of time to get these solutions successfully implemented.

  Requirements Related to Infrastructure

You do not need to have the extra infrastructure to support all your business activities. The hosted cloud services make sure that everything related to your website’s important functions has been taken care of like presence, chat, and taking care of connectivity with IPs. The monthly fee bundles many other useful features. When you are using on-premises solution, you need to have proprietary controls installed, meaning for everything additional you will be charged money. This may also involve very basic things related to business management and administration.

  Licensing Issues

The licensing fee charged in case of hosted solution is on per user basis. When you talk about licensing for on-premises, you need to take care of each software package individually in terms of the costs associated with it. There are many elements of cost which make licensing an expensive thing to do for on-premises solutions. You may also need to provide extra fee for upgrades and support. And the amount of time it requires for the updates cannot be determined in advance.

  Regular Maintenance

When you opt for a cloud based service, you do not need to worry about the updates. The cloud services provider will take care of the updates as well. On the other hand, it costs a lot more money to have regular maintenance for the entire IT infrastructure that you have installed on premises. This is another factor which significantly contributes to the cost of having on-premises solution.

TCO (Total Cost of Ownership)

The total cost of ownership is also different when comparing onsite solutions with that of the hosted services. When you are getting on-premises solutions, that means your total cost of ownership may initially sound low, but with the passage of time it will spiral out of control. On the other hand, the total cost of ownership for hosted solutions would be much lower. Whitehats provides you best IT services companies in Dubai as cloud storage solution.