How to manage and maintain on-premise infrastructure
How to manage and maintain on-premise infrastructure
Though cloud solutions are very popular today, many companies would rather run on-premise or on-prem infrastructure. In fact, many successful growing businesses prefer storing their data in-house to be safe from cyber attacks and data thefts. At the same time, cloud solutions may experience downtimes and are less customizable. Thus, companies choose self-hosted solutions taking into account all benefits of on-premises and vulnerabilities of cloud. In this blog post we will talk about advantages of storing all information in-house and will discuss challenges of on-premise infrastructure.
However, first of all let's answer the question: "What is on-premise infrastructure?"
When we refer to the on-premise infrastructure, this means using company's servers on-site. The organization has complete control over the infrastructural setup. Only employees can access company's data as it is stored on a so-called private cloud. However, in the modern world on-premises can also be applied to any physically hosted appliance, either in-house or in a private data center.
Advantages of on-premise infrastructure
For many companies the advantages of on-premise infrastructure are not evident due to the modern industry trend to use cloud solutions and data storages.
However, let's take a look at the reasons why your organization needs its own on-premise infrastructure.
- Security. Many organizations choose to have their services running on their on-premise infrastructure for security reasons. While using cloud hosting, the data gets shared with third parties and this as a result opens the door to potential security breaches. Security is critical for healthcare, financial and military industries.
- Data ownership. In-house infrastructure means you will have total control over your data. You will also be able to access everything from your internal network and rely on your company's security measures, which you take to protect the data. For example, if you want to use corporate messenger in your organization, all you need is your own or virtual server and a software license. Virola corporate messenger can be installed on any server – Windows, macOS or Linux with minimal requirements to hardware. In this case, you will have all your internal communication and files stored on your company's secure server. Such solutions are the best for government, healthcare and financial organizations.
- Compliance and customization. There are many scenarios when companies require custom solutions which cannot be provided by SaaS. In such cases the only solution is on-premises setup. Strict compliance regulations that some businesses must follow is another reason for relying on on-premise solutions. This way, you can set organization-wide privacy and security policies and ensure everyone follows them.
- No vendor lock-in. Sometimes for companies that use services of a particular vendor it is very complicated to migrate to another solution due to high switching costs, large amount of data and other complexities. In such situations they are forced to receive services from a particular vendor. On-premise or hybrid infrastructure is the best way out if you do not want to get locked in with Cloud Datastore.
How to manage and maintain on-premise infrastructure
The most challenging part of running on-premise solution is its management and maintenance. This requires specific knowledge, skills and staff. However, if you set up everything and follow the basic rules, your on-prem infrastructure will run without issues.
Internal knowledgebase
When you set up your corporate server and infrastructure, you need to document all steps carefully to facilitate future troubleshooting.
Backups and security
Backup plans are very important and will help to recover critical data in case of system failures. At the same time security measures should be applied both to software and hardware to prevent security breaches. To detect vulnerabilities, it is important to run regular system audits and penetration tests.
Upgrades and maintenance
Routine upgrades and maintenance will guarantee proper functioning of your on-prem infrastructure. They include software and hardware audits, regular software and security updates. All these measures will enhance system performance and reduce downtime.
Monitoring, alerting and disaster recovery
There are many instruments and solutions for servers monitoring, alerting and data recoveries. You need to set them up to have your hosting environment monitored 24/7 and get alerts in case of any issues. Proper monitoring will help to prevent problems before they happen.
Another important part is disaster recovery planning in case of natural disasters, cyberattacks or power outage. It is crucial as the ability of your business to continue working will depend on the disaster recovery strategy your team has.
For many businesses in-house infrastructure has been successfully working for years and with cloud solutions becoming more and more popular companies are still concerned that any attempts to replace infrastructure will result in financial loss. On the other side, if you have specific implementation and customization requirements but do not want to set up an on-prem infrastructure from scratch, you can rent virtual servers in a data center. This will significantly reduce implementation costs and human resources required for infrastructure running.