To power your operations, which applications do you use, and where are they hosted? It’s no secret that modern organizations in every vertical are headed towards software as a service model for critical applications, including enterprise resource planning. Nearly 85% of business apps are now SaaS-based, and that number is only projected to grow (CloudWards). Why is the industry trending that way? Is it still worth it to self-host your applications?
The right approach depends on your organization’s priorities around control, security, maintenance, and scalability. Each hosting model comes with clear advantages and trade-offs.
Benefits of Self-Hosting
Whether it be from investments made in pre-existing infrastructure, a commitment to current operational flow, or other constraints that prevent migration to web-based solutions, many organizations will continue to self-host for the foreseeable future. Despite trends indicating otherwise, there are considerable benefits to housing your own data and applications.
Control & Customization:
Self hosting your ERP or other critical apps allows you to keep the keys of your kingdom. Your internal IT and operations team have full command over configurations, customization of applications, and the ability to incorporate legacy platforms that work best for you. In a SaaS model, control over these components is lost. Buggy updates, degradation of legacy platforms, and loss of configuration tools are all realities that can be forced upon you without stewardship of your data and applications. Self-hosting puts the power in your team’s hands.
Security & Visibility:
A healthy amount of data security anxiety is necessary for all organizations – especially those that deal with HIPAA regulated data, Personally Identifiable Information (PII), or proprietary trade secrets. In a self-hosted environment, security policies and procedures implemented by your trusted data administrators and IT managers are what control your exposure – not frameworks set by some other corporation. Similarly, visibility is greatly increased in a self-hosted environment.
When your data is in a hosted application as a service, it’s often unclear:
- What type of server is it running on?
- What country is it housed in?
- Am I sharing a drive with other organizations that could open me to vulnerabilities?
- Is the infrastructure shared with other companies?
These are questions that can be difficult to answer if you’re not in control of your hosting environment.
Drawbacks of Self-Hosting
There are plenty of valid reasons that organizations around the world are trending away from self-hosting. Network and hardware infrastructure can be prohibitively expensive, and the internal burden of maintenance can be overwhelming. Moving your ERP and data offsite immediately removes significant pressure and responsibility from internal IT and allows them to focus on other areas of business. Here are some examples of the drawbacks of self-hosting.
Maintenance & Internal Burden:
When servers are running well, and operations are flowing, self-hosting seems like a dream. It’s when things go wrong – often at the most inconvenient moments – that the responsibility and need for support is crushing to your internal IT and workflow. The need for internal experts (engineers, database administrators, application managers) to manage servers, updates, and keep high availability is an unavoidable cost of self-hosting, and that doesn’t even include the investments in infrastructure. Moving to a cloud-based platform, whether that is purely on a per-app basis, or to an infrastructure as a service platform, removes many of the known (and hidden) costs from your organization’s balance sheet.
Scalability & Growth:
Organizations grow, and in tandem, the infrastructure must grow alongside the additions of people, services, and data. Depending on the self-hosting model, scalability constraints could be dictated by physical hardware capacity. There are substantial costs involved with upgrading infrastructure. Additionally, upgrading could be a very slow adjustment – putting your organization behind the curve of demand. In contrast, cloud-based platforms typically unlock an organization’s scalability – sometimes even seamlessly. Whether it takes a phone call, an email, or just a click of a mouse, cloud-based hosting models account for organizational growth, allowing for work to continue without a hiccup while operational thresholds grow.
Backup and Recovery Considerations
What happens when your hosting site – whether self-hosted or in the cloud – goes down? RenovoData approaches every conversation around IT data backup and disaster recovery in mind. We protect data regardless of where it lives, but there are different considerations to account for in each hosted model. The benefits of backup and DR for either model mirror their benefits on operations.
Self-hosted backup and DR
For example, if you are self-hosted, you have administrative rights over your servers that enable you to send your backups wherever you’d like, whether that be local, to a cloud, or a combination of both. It also allows you to administer your preferred backup schedule and retention policies, regardless of how customized (i.e. copies of your machines twice daily, retaining a weekly, monthly, and yearly copy). This control comes with the responsibility of administration and validating backup integrity. That’s why we recommend engaging disaster recovery experts that can manage this for you.
Hosted elsewhere backup and DR
If you’re not self-hosted, backup and disaster recovery can be tricky. Many hosting providers will claim they have your data “covered”, but will be unable to faithfully provide evidence, SLAs, or perform disaster recovery tests. Unfortunately, administrator rights for servers are typically needed to configure independent backups, and those rights are limited and rarely available in software as a service platform. However, there are some instances where you can ask your provider to configure an independent backup to a repository of your choosing. If you’re using an infrastructure as a service platform – which relieves the pain points of hosting at HQ, but still grants admin rights of servers – you have control over your backup and disaster recovery.
Every organization’s environment is unique, and the right hosting strategy should align with your security requirements, operational goals, and growth plans. If you are evaluating whether to self-host, migrate to the cloud, or build a hybrid approach we would love to schedule a call to help you design and protect a solution that meets your business objectives, email us at info@renovodata.com.
RenovoData is a leading regulatory-compliant, cloud data protection IT services company. Our solutions range from File and Database Backup, Server Recovery, Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), Custom Cloud Hosting and Consulting solutions for on-premises and hosted environments.