Should a business run BSS on-premise or on the public cloud?

Should a business run BSS on-premise or on the public cloud?

A typical software solution requires a networking and computer infrastructure, an application runtime environment such as databases or application servers, and on top of it, the application is deployed. Clearly you can do all this on-premise in your data center in virtual machines, but now it is much easier to consume this over the cloud.

The reason for this is that all the way up to the application runtime environment, public cloud services provide managed services that deal with the major complexities of operating these systems. This includes the whole element of high availability, the scalability when the workload increases, but also the scalability down when the workload decreases, security, backup and restore, and monitoring of this. If you run your solution on-premise, you need to deal with all of this yourself and once your business takes off you might have difficulties scaling with the demands on the requirements of your workload. All of this gets much easier in the public cloud and therefore we recommend forgetting about the private cloud environment and purely moving to the public cloud.

One question we get asked very often is whether a solution can be run on-premise or through the cloud? While you can run technically run the solution on-premise, the bigger question is why would you do that? Nowadays software solutions require quite complex runtime environments. This includes the networking and compute infrastructure as well as the application runtime environments such as databases or application servers like Kubernetes clusters. But you can technically run this infrastructure on-premise. It's a very hard job to achieve the required level of high availability, security and robustness for these infrastructure components. It's very unlikely that companies have the know how required in-house to run and operate them, and more importantly, to continuously improve and upgrade them with new versions that arise in the market. Therefore, we strongly recommend to consume solutions in the public cloud.

In the public cloud managed services exist for all of these components and the public cloud provider deals with the complexity of a lot of the non-functional elements such as security, scalability, robustness, as well as the whole monitoring, backup and restore mechanisms of this. You can consume them as-a-service and deploy your software on top of it, and therefore it provides more benefit compared to running and operating it in your on-premise environment.