Comparing Deployment Options for Mission-Critical Applications

The business landscape is constantly transforming, with new technologies, companies, and trends coming into play. As organizations embrace modern tools and systems to enable digital transformation, the complexity of integrating this ever-evolving technology stack intensifies. Things get even more challenging as customer expectations change. These factors make it critical for organizations to consider different hosting options – depending on current infrastructure, future goals, customer needs, and customization and integration requirements. 

The various hosting options 

Infrastructure hosting has come a long way: from servers being hosted on-premises to being hosted in third-party data centers, and now the cloud. Offering different levels of flexibility, control, security, and scalability, they deliver multiple options for provisioning IT infrastructure and deploying applications. The right hosting option varies from organization to organization; the choice depends on the business (and IT strategy) as well as workload requirements. 

Here’s looking at the top 3 hosting options: 

Managed Hosting

The time, cost, and effort involved in hosting and managing complex IT infrastructure has many organizations turning to Managed Hosting. A common IT provision model, Managed Hosting enables organizations to use dedicated servers and associated hardware of a service provider, with the latter managing those systems from beginning to end. Organizations can outsource the management of the underlying infrastructure and the application lifecycle management to a managed hosting provider. 

Pros:

1. Good control: A managed SaaS-based hosting platform like Codefactori provides organizations with good control over their mission-critical tools infrastructure and support, giving them the freedom to choose flexible SLA (service level agreements) tiers provided by Atlassian and DevOps technology certified experienced resources. 
2. Ideal for mission-critical applications: Given how important it is for organizations to access their mission-critical applications without interruption, Managed Hosting provides them with the ability to rely on an external service provider like Codefactori for high availability, uptime, and performance. 
3. Scalability: Managed Hosting service providers use modern technologies like cloud and automated provisioning to manage their infrastructure, without having the expertise required for doing so themselves. By providing the flexibility to increase (or decrease) computing resources, it helps businesses to compete and grow with unprecedented ease. 
4. Less administrative overhead: Codefactori takes care of automated infrastructure setup and configuration and provides round-the-clock technical support, including patch management, updates, system monitoring, and maintenance. This greatly reduces the administrative overhead for organizations, allowing them to focus on meeting their goals by utilizing the capabilities of these mission-critical tools to the maximum. 

Cons:

1. Security: Although Managed Service providers take care of administrative activities such as monitoring, updates, and patch management, ensuring security is often a challenge. Modern platforms like Codefactori provide enterprise-grade infrastructure and application security, including SSL communications and Security Advisory updates, enabling organizations to enjoy high-security levels. 
2. Compliance: Organizations in highly regulated industries do not generally have the option of using a third-party hosting service. For such organizations, Codefactori Enterprise is a great option that allows them to use automated lifecycle management capability to deploy and manage tools in their own infrastructure – thus being compliant with the required regulatory requirements. 
3. Data management: In Managed Hosting, organizations have the ability to manage their data with tight controls. In a managed hosting environment organizations have to strategically choose their managed hosting provider to ensure the data is managed in a secure and compliant way.

On-Premise Hosting

The most common hosting option for organizations from the beginning has been on-premise hosting. This option allows organizations to host their IT infrastructure – either in their own physical servers located on-premises or in a physical data center.

Pros:

1. Relatively secure: Because all IT systems and workloads are secured in a private server controlled by the organization, on-prem hosting provides a good level of baseline security to organizations. 
2. Full control: In an on-prem setting, organizations enjoy complete control over their systems while maintaining 100 percent privacy. Organizations can choose the systems they want, as well as decide their configurations, the level of security, and more. 
3. Advanced customizations: With full control, organizations can also enjoy advanced levels of customizations. They can change software settings, expand network security, as well as revamp IT management policies to fit the unique needs of their business. 
4. Ideal for strict security and regulatory environments: For organizations with extreme compliance requirements, on-prem hosting is ideal. All systems and associated data are hosted in physical data centers make it an ideal choice for strict security and regulatory environments. 

Cons:

1. High administrative load: With on-prem hosting, organizations have the responsibility of acquiring, implementing, configuring, and maintaining, and supporting the infrastructure. This results in a high administrative load and also puts IT teams under immense stress of day-to-day management. 
2. Compliance needs to be managed by the enterprise: Since companies host their IT within their own private servers, all compliance-related needs have to be managed by them – which takes away time and focus from more business-critical tasks. 
3. High CapEx: On-prem hosting requires organizations to invest heavily in procuring and implementing systems and servers, which adds greatly to overall CapEx. 

To overcome these cons, Addteq offers our Codefactori Enterprise solution that allows automated lifecycle management even for organizations that need to use on-premise hosting. It offers the required installation, automation, and agility to your new or existing on-premise toolset with full access to security, availability, and flexibility. 

Cloud Hosting 

For organizations with growing needs, cloud hosting has become a popular option that allows them to respond to market demands with agility while eliminating administrative overhead. By hosting mission-critical applications on cloud infrastructure, it provides unmatched flexibility and scalability to organizations. 

Pros:

1. Get started immediately: With cloud hosting, organizations needn’t worry about procuring or setting up complex IT infrastructure. Instead, they can leverage IT resources available in the cloud and get started immediately. 
2. Pay as you go: Since organizations pay for the resources they use on a pay-as-you-go basis, cloud hosting completely eliminates CapEx, enabling better cost efficiencies. Organizations can plug and play their cloud solution – they can scale up their resources during peak usage and scale them down during a slump – while only paying for what they use when they use it. 
3. No need to worry about security, compliance, or upgrade at physical infrastructure level: The cloud hosting provider not only provides the required compute or storage infrastructure; it also hosts, manages, and maintains it – while taking care of security, compliance, and upgrade requirements. 
4. Highly scalable: Because organizations get access to on-demand resources, they can easily and quickly scale their business based on their needs – without worrying about the availability of resources or performance of applications. 

Cons:

1. Limited customization: Because cloud environments are entirely owned and managed by service providers, they often offer little or no customization options to organizations. Those looking to tailor IT to suit their individual needs might hit a roadblock with cloud hosting. 
2. Security responsibility: Although organizations can be worry-free when it comes to managing and maintaining their cloud infrastructure, they are still responsible for security at the virtual and application infrastructure/configuration layer when utilizing the cloud.
3. Limited control: Although Cloud service providers own and take care of all aspects of hosting and managing resources, security, and compliance can become challenging in a cloud environment. Service providers usually have the upper hand when it comes to controlling functionality, assets, and access. 
4. Costs may go high if not managed properly: Although cloud helps in bringing down CapEx to nil, if not managed properly, organizations stand the risk of extremely high cloud bills. Since cloud instances are so easy to spin up, organizations must constantly track usage to identify and prune redundant cloud resources including temporary test instances. It also becomes necessary to properly size instances and resources for the use case and based on best practices.

Codefactori Enterprise can help organizations overcome the many challenges that come with cloud hosting. Including:

1. reducing the complexity of managing security at virtual and application infrastructure level
2. making it easy for organizations to scale their cloud infrastructure 
3. providing a unified location to manage all cloud tools
4. taking full control of application shutdowns, restarts, and upgrades. 
5. ensuring compliance needs are met while deploying the applications with best practices and automated lifecycle management.

Conclusion

In a constantly changing business landscape, the different hosting options provide a range of capabilities for organizations to meet their business needs. 

While Managed Hosting is advisable for those looking for a fair amount of control and security of mission-critical applications, on-prem works best for organizations in highly regulated industries that need full control over their IT. Cloud hosting, on the other hand, works best for organizations that want to focus on critical business tasks to keep pace with changing demands – with no administrative headaches. 

Although each hosting option comes with its own set of pros and cons, opting for Codefactori Enterprise or SaaS to leverage the benefits of managed hosting, can be critical to the success of the deployment strategy you choose. With Codefactori you can quickly spin up your environment and ensure seamless performance and availability of your workloads. You can be sure to leverage the latest features and functionalities, get the required maintenance support, and scale at ease to meet the growing needs of your organization.