6 Benefits of an On-Site IT Infrastructure

There are specific circumstances under which having your servers and your whole IT infrastructure on-site is necessary. For those cases, there are a few key advantages. Here are our top 6.

Full Transcript Below: 

Cris:

Custom configurations, upgrades, system changes, all of that is very much within your control.

Cody:

Want completely air-gapped, or want complete control over because-

Cris:

It’s your process. It’s your infrastructure. It’s there, you control it.

Cody:

Cool nitrogen NASA supercomputer or it could be-

Cris:

Water flowing through it.

Cody:

Literally, a farm of raspberry pies.

Cris:

We have something fun, we’re going to be rolling out. We’re talking IT infrastructure. And so, today we’re going to talk specifically about on-premises IT infrastructure, which is something that I would say to keep an eye on because it may or may not necessarily be for you to have an on-premises infrastructure for your IT. More than likely, probably not, but we’re going to talk about benefits of on-premises IT today. Then also later, we’ll release obviously the off-premises infrastructure. So, six benefits for on-premises IT infrastructure.

Custom Configs and System

Cris:

Number one, I think, is the fact that you have custom configurations, upgrades, system changes. All of that is very much within your control and purview. Let’s unpack that a little.

Cody:

Absolutely, yeah. If you have the metal in your building or in any of your premises, wherever those may be, you can put whatever you want in terms of hardware. You can customize it to be super cool nitrogen NASA supercomputer or it could be-

Cris:

Water flowing through it.

Cody:

Literally a farm of raspberry pies. It doesn’t really matter. You have full control over that. That’s certainly one of the benefits, absolutely.

Cris:

You decide, “I don’t want this anymore. I want to change to this.” Fine, do it. It doesn’t matter. It’s your process. It’s your infrastructure. It’s there, you control it.

Cody:

Exactly.

Cris:

Very, very important, if you want that physical control and you want to have the overall, “This is mine. I do with it what I want.” Then, okay. Maybe think about on-premises IT.

Control Your Data

Cris:

What about number two? What about the data?

Cody:

The data, yes. That’s one huge benefit of on-premises. Also why you see a lot of on-premises IT taking place in government. Although there’s less and less of that nowadays, there’s still very sensitive things in government that they want completely air gapped or want complete control over because national security and stuff, right? I think that’s a big part even in private industry is that if you really want total control over your data, and of course, the hardware as we last talked about, then yeah, you’re going to want to probably have it on premises, right?

Cris:

Because you basically are, unless you’re exposing this out to the internet in some manner, I mean you could even basically be offline if you really wanted to. I mean just locally have it basically be networked.

Cody:

There’s numerous times even where I’ve been in a large organization and there’s usually a VPN they have, and there’s two buttons, internet or intranet, which is the classical everything’s connected inside this building kind of stuff or at least between sites. Pretty common for super sensitive stuff or things that they definitely don’t want in the real open internet.

Access without the Internet

Cris:

So the idea of, I’m going to retain my data and I’m going to control all of that data is very important when you’re talking on-premises. What about number three? Who can access that data?

Cody:

Who can access the data? Well, that’s the benefit of an internet or some sort of thing that doesn’t have to actually physically connect offsite or at least off to the open internet. In the event of an infrastructure outage, you can still have control and access to that. It’s right there. If there’s a problem, send Steve from IT down to go fix it. But when it comes to being able to physically access your data no matter what, you’re not going to get better than on premises because you’re in full control over it.

Save on Subscriptions

Cris:

Gotcha. Number four. What’s another benefit of these six.

Cody:

You can save on subscription fees.

Cris:

Okay, gotcha.

Cody:

In the modern world, I think every company that can is trying to transition to being a platform as a service.

Cris:

Sure.

Cody:

Everyone wants to charge a monthly fee. It’s a great business model. There’s a reason.

Cris:

Sure. But it can snowball, I could see.

Cody:

It can snowball.

Cris:

Depending on your organization size, how many manager users you need. But all these different parameters that suddenly you go from like, the 14-day free trial package to now it’s 7.99, into like, why do I have a server hosting bill of $15,000?

Cody:

No, that’s real. Yeah, absolutely. Most businesses can absorb the cost of a Slack subscription or something of that sort.

Cris:

Sure.

Cody:

Because it’s like $7 a month per user, per whatever, and that’s fine. But when it comes to Enterprise level software, that gets crazy quick. That can be 20 to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year depending on what kind of software we’re talking about. Saving on that infrastructure cost either due to software licenses or hosting, or maybe there’s an on site option, you can usually save some money in that in the long term.

Multiple Users Accessing without Slowing

Cris:

Gotcha. Okay, number five, multiple users can basically access the system without slowing it down. Unpack that. What does that mean?

Cody:

I think that there’s a little bit of … I want to say that question’s a little interesting.

Cris:

Exactly. That’s why it’s nuanced and let’s unpack that.

Cody:

The main part of that is a lot of, if you’re accessing something off premises, you all have to funnel through a single internet gateway. Almost certainly in pretty much every case. Sometimes there’s a redundant one as a backup, but in the end, everyone, all the thousands of people in a large organization have to funnel onto one line. If that becomes bogged down because of high bandwidth activity, you’re going to slow down that access. Let’s say, especially in the modern world of telecommuting and remote work, a bunch of video streams going everywhere can end up being terabytes per second of data if it’s compounded by thousands of people working in a single organization. That’s one benefit of onsite IT, is that ultimately all of the core infrastructure won’t slow down because it’s all being processed here, not through this gateway.

Fully Customizable

Cris:

Gotcha. Gotcha. So bring it home, unpack this last point for us, which I think ties into one a little bit. But let’s just unpack it and bring it all around the close up. Why ultimately as a company the on-premises IT infrastructure is the right fit for you?

Cody:

I think attaching an analogy to this is probably the most appropriate. If you want something quick and easy, you’re going to buy something that is pre-made. But if you want to make it yourself, you’re going to do the DIY option.

Cris:

Got it.

Cody:

On-premises is DIY almost certainly in every way. Because of that, you have a lot more customizability, and you can end up making it in any way you want. But the downside is you have to do it. So that’s pretty much the full unpack of on site premises. On-premises IT, I should say.

Cris:

Cool. So I touched this, of course, at the very beginning, which was this may or this may not be the solution for most actual companies or organizations out there. But if you hit these check marks that we talked about, would you consider doing cloud? Should you? Or is it, “No, this is the way”?

Cody:

To be honest, in the modern world of tech, it’s oftentimes so much cheaper to go with not on premises IT. There’s very few reasons why you would need it, but if you have those reasons-

Cris:

It’s going to be one of these six.

Cody:

Yeah, it’s going to be of these six, and you’re going to have no other option. I think a lot of that comes down to really the data control nowadays more than almost anything else. But most people are going to want cloud hosting, which we’re going to talk about next episode.

Cris:

Gotcha. I do also want to be, like I said, it would be one of these six and made a four.

Cody:

Yeah, you made a four. Why do you have six fingers?

Cris:

Well, I appreciate this, Cody. I’m excited. I hope again, people are able to get some good takeaways from this and they’re going to be able to make a determining factor if, “Should I own this? Should I have this custom solution that’s on my plate to handle and manage, but again, I get all the control?”

Cody:

Exactly.

Cris:

“Or do I want to open myself up to not a wild west where I have zero control, but a place where it’s a bit more shared ecosystem, but it’s in the cloud and highly, highly accessible?”

Alexandra:

Thank you for joining us for this episode of Bixly Tech Tuesday. I hope you enjoyed that conversation between Chris and Cody as they talked about the benefits of an onsite it infrastructure. If you have any questions at all, go ahead and leave them in the comment section and we will get right back to you. Don’t forget to check out our description box down below. We have a bunch of really helpful links and in particular, I want to highlight our free DevOps guide. Because DevOps is so key to your IT infrastructure, this can really help you understand how important DevOps can be to your software project. Also, don’t forget to check us out online, bixly.com. There’s a button right at the top, Start My Roadmap. That actually gets you a free 60-minute call with Cris to discuss your project needs. Until next time, this has been an episode of Bixly Tech Tuesday.