Organizations of all sizes depend on various systems and applications to facilitate daily business operations such as billing, internal and external communication, among others. These systems include different types of servers that perform different kinds of functions or host specific applications.
On-premise system management vs. Cloud Hosting
To understand which solution is best for your organization, decision-makers must compare different factors such as cost, security, flexibility, reliability, and accessibility. In addition to the costs incurred by on-premise system management, other factors to consider include;
- Compliance with local standards
In order to host servers on-premise, your IT staff must be aware of any and all certifications or licenses required to deploy the system. With managed hosting, you have a team that is trained and has already all the requirements needed for each and every one of your servers to function optimally.
2. Flexibility
As your business grows, workloads and data also continue to grow which in turn begins to decline your systems’ speed and performance. In addition, you will eventually require software or hardware upgrades. For on premise systems, this means scheduling downtime in order to safely deploy upgrades. Most IT staff can agree that processes of upgrading on premise systems can be time consuming and tedious.
Consider a case of striking the iron while hot when business opportunities arise, for example, the sudden sanitizer spike in demand once COVID-19 was announced. The lack of flexibility in on-premise system management means preparing to strike the iron for so long that once you are ready, it has gone cold again.
With managed hosting, addition of resources or upgrades is a seamless process that does not affect your current operations.
3. System downtime
Many businesses require 99.99% system uptime in order to stay competitive yet for many businesses that manage on-premise systems, this is nothing but a dream. On-premise systems face downtime for many reasons including power outages, hardware or software failure, overheating, human error, and natural disasters.
Read more on the cost of application downtime
4. Security
The security of on-premise systems largely involves securing its physical location as well as using backup and disaster recovery measures to secure the system, applications, and data in the event of a cyberattack, manmade and natural disasters. In most cases when backing up on-premise servers is left to IT personnel, backup schedules can be inconsistent or systems are not backed up at all. A handful of such organizations also lack an elaborate disaster recovery plan.
Studies show that 60% of businesses that experience catastrophic data loss will close within half a year. With managed hosting, you never have to worry about both aspects. With managed backup and disaster recovery, server monitoring and ransomware protection for your hosted systems and applications, you are guaranteed of 99.9% service availability despite any business disruption.
5. Cost
To maximize profits, you must minimize cost, a basic principle all businesses run on. The types of costs that are inherent in on-premise hosting did not give a proper overview of how insidious these costs are. Other than the obvious hardware purchase and maintenance cost, there’s also:
- Backups and their management
- Disaster recovery planning
- Software licensing
- Heating and cooling costs
- Fire suppression
- Power setup and other redundant sources of power
- Staffing costs
This does not factor in the non-monetary costs incurred in case any of these systems fail. They include;
- Productivity costs
- Customer loss
- Reputation damage
- Shareholder value impact
With managed hosting, what do you pay? A monthly fee. That’s it. No catch, no hidden costs. Moreover, one cannot put a price on the peace of mind that managed hosting solutions inevitably bring.
Download the full article and learn more about cloud management of business systems today under the new business normal.
