The primary objective of IT solutions in the current business era is meant to make working more efficient and agile. These solutions also serve to make the businesses easily accessible to the users. Cloud computing, cybersecurity, network infrastructure are some solutions that businesses today adopt for streamlining their workflow. What are on-premise solutions? What are different types of on-premise solutions? Are these cost-effective or cost-consuming?

What are On-Premise Solutions?

When a certain software or technology is located within the physical confines of an organization’s data center, it is called on-premise software. This makes it possible for the company’s staff to have direct access to the data, configuration, and data management. In a way, an on-premise software solution can also be called a company’s own private cloud.

It is primarily owing to security reasons that the companies opt for on-premise software. But it is in the complex nature of this software that it turns out to be a costly affair.

Cost of On-Premise Software

It is a widely accepted fact in the IT world that a cloud solution is more cost-effective as compared to an on-premise solution. Some aspects suggestive of this are:

• With the on-prem application purchasing, staffing, and hardware arrangements to implement it, the bombarding of repeated upgrade cycle begins. These frequent upgrades eventually cost the organizations a huge amount of money and resources.
• The lead time required to roll out new technologies is significantly high in the on-premise software than the cloud solutions.
• There is no escape from the tape or disk back-ups adding in as abandoned silos.
• With multiple layers of firewalls and passwords, accessibility is limited in the complex on-premise software.
• An on-prem being oversized, added expenses on the resources cannot be brought down. These require a significant amount of effort as well as energy to achieve a certain level of performance. In addition to this, scaling up of the servers can be deeply expensive.
• Factors like the size of the data center, server downtime are likely to have a major impact upon the business operations as well as the yearly revenue.
• An advanced level of management, development, and testing is required in on-premise software integration.
• The average resource sizing in on-prem solutions is 40% more than the required sizing.

Even though the on-premise solutions get overshadowed by the multiple benefits of the cloud solutions, yet, the fact that the latter remains questionable regarding the security of the data is still a debatable issue. Customization of solutions is not an option with cloud-based software. An organization gives privacy rights to the third party in this software. Whereas, when an organization chooses an on-premise installation, the data remains within the firm, which majorly reduces the possibilities of the data breach. In a way, the amount of control over the data is more in an on-premise solution as compared to the cloud.

How to Escape the On-Prem Expenses?

Moving from a traditional application system to a public or private cloud can significantly reduce operational costs. Few measures which can be taken to cut down on the on-premise cost are:

• Outsourcing can tremendously reduce the expenses as it is available for just a fraction of the cost.
• Project estimates and requirements should be estimated well. This nullifies the chances of ending up with a bunch of unused resources. This is important because in on-prem the flexibility of acquiring new resources is very low.
• Storage is an integral part of any business with an IT infrastructure. Storage management can turn into a nightmare in an on-prem solution.

In a nutshell, it can be concluded that maintaining a check on the assets and monitoring the usage of services is important with any software solutions. Yet, giving the burden to a third party is always a positive move.