Choosing the right deployment model for your workflow automation software is a crucial decision. In this blog post, we’ll examine on-premises vs cloud pros and cons, review the differences between on premise and cloud and consider which option is right for your organisation.
What is cloud hosting?
In recent years, cloud computing has gained immense popularity, leading numerous businesses to abandon on-premises solutions and move towards the adoption of cloud solutions (public/private/hybrid).
With cloud hosting, software applications are hosted off-site. You (or your supplier) will lease space from a third-party data centre or directly from vendors like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure.
If your preference is the cloud, we will host your software within our cloud infrastructure, making it available to all your users worldwide.
Cloud-first
First introduced in 2013 (and updated in 2023), the UK Government have adopted a cloud-first policy, effectively mandating the public sector to consider and evaluate potential cloud solutions before any other option. Subsequently, other public sector organisations including the National Health Service (NHS) have moved to cloud based environments.
The move to cloud-first may explain why Gartner, Inc. expect cloud computing to shift from being a technology disruptor to becoming a necessary component for maintaining business competitiveness by 2028. In the same report, Gartner revealed that worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to total $679 billion in 2024 and is projected to exceed $1 trillion in 2027.
Advantages of cloud computing
Some of the benefits of cloud vs on premise include:
Cost-effective
One of the attractions of cloud adoption is the pay-as-you-go (or consumption-based) pricing. The licensing costs are based on the number of monthly users and include updates, support, and hosting.
Another significant cost saving is you do not need to pay for the physical infrastructure, with the cloud provider responsible for maintaining hardware.
Scalability
Cloud platforms offers unrivalled flexibility with the ability to scale up or down depending on demand. For example, our cloud subscriptions for Process Director are billed annually in advance with any adjustments for over/under usage made at the end of the year giving you the flexibility to scale as required during the term.
Accessibility
Cloud-based software is accessible from any location. This allows employees to work remotely and promotes team collaboration across an organisation and with suppliers and customers alike.
Reliability
Data centres make significant investments in their infrastructure and security provision to provide high availability of servers (and ultimately your systems).
As an example, our cloud infrastructure is equipped with ultra-efficient cooling and industry-leading resiliency and redundancy to guarantee uninterrupted power, cooling, and network connectivity. This means that if the server hosting your system experiences a fault, redundancy is activated so you will experience no downtime or data loss.
Support
With cloud solutions, you do not need to worry about any aspect of managing or maintaining the software as the vendor will manage licencing, infrastructure, upgrades, security, support, uptime etc.
Disadvantages of cloud hosting
Some disadvantages of cloud hosting include:
Lack of control
A commonly cited barrier to entry is loss of control and visibility as sensitive data resides on a third-party server which may be susceptible to an outage. For example, in March, McDonalds were unable to process fast-food orders in the UK, Australia, and Japan after a third-party configuration change.
The reality is cloud computing offers access to servers in data centres with high availability, built in redundancy, 27/7 cloud security, and on-site monitoring. In the event of downtime, data is retrievable as the server is replicated to another location.
If the public cloud does not ease your concerns, private cloud options are available where you are the only one with access to the server, system, and data but it is all hosted upon cloud infrastructure.
Limited customisation and integration
Cloud-hosted software can be less customisable than its on-premises counterpart. Although cloud-based software integrates with many third-party applications via web services and APIs, it may be more difficult to connect to legacy systems in-house.
No ownership
Whilst cloud licensing allows you to pay for just the users you need, when you need them, this does mean that you never have the stability of owning a perpetual license to use the software.
Total cost of ownership (TCO)
The cloud provides a lower cost for entry for workflow automation software but when considering the license costs alone over several years, it can lead to higher TCO, although this extra cost has to be balanced against your savings in infrastructure resourcing too.
A high TCO has led some organisations to rethink their cloud strategies, having found long-term costs higher than expected. According to Citrix, 42% of organisations surveyed in the USA are considering or already have moved at least half of their cloud-based workloads back to on-premises infrastructures. At the same time, Techopedia revealed over 43% of IT leaders surveyed found that moving applications and data from on-premises to the cloud was more expensive than expected.
Meanwhile, David Heinemeier Hansson, the co-owner & CTO of 37signals, has written a blog post on LinkedIn documenting how the makers of the Basecamp project management tool have shifted their seven cloud apps from AWS into their own hardware which is hosted in a professional data centre. In the article, David says their cloud bill is now $1.3 million compared to $3.2 million with AWS, a saving of $1.9 million.
Vendor lock-in
Another argument against the cloud is the potential for lock-in and dependence on the vendor. As the decision to outsource hosting to the cloud is a core element of your IT infrastructure strategy, it can be impractical to switch suppliers if they subsequently increase their pricing or you become unhappy with them.
To ease concerns around vendor lock-in, you will not be locked into a long-term contract, and only pay for the initial set-up and monthly subscription for your concurrent users. You may terminate the agreement by giving at least 90 days’ written notice of termination. Upon termination, ePC can provide an export of your data in a non-proprietary format.
Some other complaints about the cloud model include reduced performance (when sharing resources on public servers) and possible downtime from outages (as the cloud is dependent on the internet).