Cloud versus On-Premises

Cloud-based software versus on-premises brings up a lot of questions regarding safety, performance and privacy. We can address some of those questions, which are easy enough to find with any search, but focus primarily on how they impact Project Insight.

Why Cloud?

The first answer to this seems easy. If you're using software built for use on the internet than cloud is your choice. Why buy software made for an environment which won't be your platform? The more difficult answer is that maybe you want it on the cloud, but you want tighter control over what does and does not get accessed over the cloud. Let's talk because we can make this work for you too.

Cost is almost always higher for on-premises. It may not seem like it at first, but PI isn't built and tested for hardware limitations which are rapidly becoming less of a factor in the cloud. Large applications which have no on-premises offering don't think about how many processors and how much RAM can fit in a box. It's not a factor and should not limit development progress to new and dynamic 

But then maybe the cloud is accessible to your on-premises platform and you want more control over what can and cannot be accessed from the cloud. For example, it's okay to have read access to real-time help material for the application only.

Why On-Premises

The easy answer is that you are not allowed to use the cloud in your organization for any business critical software and you have a large private network that can scale to fit any reasonably-sized application. A large health care organization with enterprise data management can build their own VPN adding memory and CPU resources as needed without taking down servers and plugging physical hardware into them. It's how they roll.

As of writing this article, most PI critical features work without access to the cloud. Integrating with other cloud-only sources will not work for the obvious reasons that they cannot be accesses. For example, if you want to add an integration to chat session software that is exclusive to the cloud.

Don't forget that providers like Microsoft and Oracle are also building applications strictly for the cloud. Microsoft's Power BI application for example has real-time regional data integration with your business data that can only be accessed from cloud-based sources.