4 Cost-Saving Advantages of Public Cloud vs. On-Premises

If you’ve ever stopped to consider just how expensive the total cost of ownership is for on-premises servers, then you’re likely already searching for viable alternatives. Upgrade, maintenance, and personnel costs for the resource running your on-premises applications are high. In most cases, it’s difficult to justify the capital expenditure for new on-premises capacity.

That said, plenty of organizations already have their own on-premises data centers that they’ve substantially invested in. These businesses may be wise to continue utilizing this investment in the foreseeable future. Or maybe, taking on a full migration to public cloud seems too intimidating and involved.

As it turns out, making the move to public cloud has enough cost-saving advantages that it probably doesn’t make financial sense to keep using the same on-premises resources. Here’s why the OPEX cost of using the cloud makes sense in light of the CAPEX involved with on-premises solutions.

4 Cost-Saving Advantages of Public Cloud vs. On-Premises

1. The Public Cloud is Endlessly Scalable

A scalable solution can save you cost and hassle. The public cloud scales as easily as adding additional capacity to your account. Increases in demand can be adjusted for quickly, so you’re not stuck paying for something you don’t use.

Alternately, with on-premises you’re going to need additional servers, more space, extra human power to run your operations—along with the added cost all this brings. If your needs change, you have to be certain the additional capacity justifies the extra capital investment and opportunity cost.

Besides these challenges, consider how on-premises also limits your ability to scale can constrain your ability to iterate and quickly pivot. With on-premises, it’s much more difficult to flex and stay innovative with changes in your environment. Public cloud avoids this.

2. Stay Resilient without Breaking the Bank

Public cloud solutions present an opportunity to improve resiliency. As an added bonus, the cloud also makes this cheaper.

If it’s expensive to have one on-premises solution, then redundancy and disaster recovery are at least double the additional investment and management. Resource-intensive decisions—such as having a second data center in another region, or performing your own frequent backups—can become more trouble than they’re worth.

The public cloud helps you plan for the worst while avoiding the significant outlay that comes with adding another datacenter or colocation solution.

3. Avoid Upgrade Cycle Pain

One ongoing pain-point for companies using on-premises resources is the upgrade cycle. And if you have to care for your own data center, upgrade cycles can be very long and expensive. The resource waste can drain valuable time and attention from other areas of the organization.

The public cloud requires less upgrading. With a vendor responsible for maintaining the cloud (instead of you), you can skip the frustration. Your employees and customers probably won’t even notice when the underlying services are being maintained. Instead of losing months of productivity and enduring the worst, you can focus more on your business.

4. Save on Development and Server Provisioning

Assuming you’re carefully managing your resource use and deployment, the cloud can save you tremendously.

Here’s another big advantage of public cloud: you can shift some of your development costs away. Mobile responsiveness, for instance, is tough to offer when you’re dealing with many security layers and an on-premises application. Bringing these applications up to speed is not always a cheap and easy fix.

Plus, when you’re developing applications, you no longer need to worry about server management. Public cloud services can do this for you so you’re not stuck writing additional code to provision servers and storage.

Making the Public Cloud Migration

If you’re looking to start the migration process to a public cloud service, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us to learn more about what’s involved and how Anexinet’s expert consultants can help.