Am I safe on earth (On-Premise) or Cloud!

The answer is simple. Unless you don’t take care of your safety, you are neither safe on earth nor the Cloud.

Which means we need to be clear with our objectives & priorities to choose between Cloud and On-Premise.

Not convinced, no problem. I’ll explain that with the help of a simple scenario.

A story of “On-Premise Transport Co.”.

Mike started a transport company. To begin with, he had to set up the following units for his business:

Infrastructure:

1. 100 brand new vehicles
2. Offices, depots and other buildings

Platform:

1. 150 drivers and 50 maintenance staff
2. A mechanism to manage schedule & bookings

Software:

1. Navigation system
2. Customer support etc.

He set up everything to provide transportation service to the customer. The return of investment is good during the on-season. But, the operational expenditure is unmanageable during the off-season.

Then, he thought of making the following changes to his business model to limit the operational expenditure, manage the scalability as per the demand and stay focused on core business (to serve customer’s transportation needs)

1. Get ride of infrastructure ownership. → IaaS /PaaS: Hire infrastructure and/or platform required for business operations and build your business model on top of that.
2. Pooling vehicles, drivers and other maintenance staff as per the demand. → auto-scaling: Compute the resources required to serve the load and pay as you go.
3. Subscribe to readily available software/apps for business operations and support→ SaaS: Subscribe to readymade apps without worrying about coding, testing and maintenance of that.

Eventually, he saved substantial capital cost by deligating infrastructure and platform maintenance tasks to the3rd party venders (Azure, AWS, Google, etc.) and increased profits by focusing mainly on core business strategies.