Question

Imagine if you were sales representatives of the vendors offering on-premise or cloud-based solutions.

How would you make arguments for why UNSW should adopt either on-premise or cloud-based solutions?

Answer 1

Imagining and assuming to be a sales representative of the vendors offering, say, cloud-based solutions, say, Amazon Web Services (AWS) vendor in particular, and speaking for cloud-based solutions over and against on-premise solutions, the University of New South Wales (UNSW Sydney), which is an Australian public research university, should definitely go for cloud-based solutions.

Reasons and business justifications:

Whatever below are mentioned about cloud-based solutions, are the exact opposite on-premise-based solutions. Cloud-based solutions offer and provide many aspects which are found the least or not found at all in on-premise-based solutions.

Cloud Computing technology is the buzz word or in other words the most booming technology currently. It has already become very popular, reputed, recognized, and trusted technology. Also, more and more organizations, companies, governments of different countries, educational institutions, health sector domains, public sector organizations, non-profit organizations and many other sector entities are, all opting for and adopting 100 percent or to at least some extent to cloud-based solutions i.e., choosing private, hybrid, community, and mostly, public cloud service providers. We shall talk about public cloud service providers and on-premise data centers for our arguments.

From the technical perspective, cloud-based applications, systems, software, devices, components, network, servers, services, and solutions are created, deployed, provisioned, hosted, and run on the public cloud service provider or vendor's servers and accessed through a web browser on clients or customers' machines anytime, from anywhere, and on any device, thus giving flexibility to the clients and customers to use it. Whereas, on-premise software, applications, solutions, and systems are installed, deployed, and run locally on an organizations' or a company's own network, computers, databases, storage devices, and servers and all the data and information are stored inside the premises of the company both, logically and physically rather than at a remote facility such as a server farm or cloud or public cloud in particular.

Cloud-based servers rule out licensing costs and get rid of upfront investments or payment. Monthly and even pay-as-you-go payments make cloud-based server hosting and using other cloud solutions and services seamless and cost-efficient. Public cloud-based servers and service providers provide their client and customer companies advantages, comfortability, and benefits from continuous provider updates and upgrades, and service management, monitoring, and administration options. Which, are not the cases in on-premise servers.

Cloud-based solutions offer reduced time to benefit and market even globally. It offers lower costs, sometimes and in some of their services and solutions, they offer the lowest cost and even some of the specific services or features are free forever. It offers scalability and integration. They offer new releases, features, options, and services, important and critical security patches, updates and upgrades. Cloud-based solutions are easy to use and perform proof of concepts. Public cloud infrastructure is cheaper than running on-premises data centers. Cloud-based solutions offer and handle all the management, administration, monitoring, auditing, regulatory and compliance, most importantly the security of IT infrastructure, services, systems, devices, components, servers, network, applications, services, software, hardware, storage, databases, etc. Which is not the case in on-premise-based solutions.

Cloud services are a subset of hosted services. Hence, cloud services, solutions, and applications are web-enabled, as opposed being physical hardware-based, they are deployed and based on a shared virtual environment handled and managed by a, say, public cloud-hosting provider. Cloud-based solutions follow best practices for businesses. In fact, 53 percent of corporate data is stored in the cloud. Cloud-based solutions are easy to learn, understand and work with, it is simple, intuitive, seamless, quick, cheap, flexible, global, secured (top most priority or job zero), audited, monitored, managed, administered, regulated, complied to appropriate laws, rules, obligations, agreements, standards, policies, etc, always, available and accessible, and also offer many other positive aspects.