On Premise Vs Hosted Intranet

There are valid arguments for both, but ultimately your needs are going to be unique to you. We’ve compiled some high level arguments for and against hosting your new Intranet in the cloud, and for keeping it on premise.

For Hosted

Depending on who you choose to host your new Intranet with, the cloud offers increasing economies of scale that are tough to beat if choosing to invest in locally grown and managed infrastructure. A hosted Intranet is also better suited to both a CAPEX or OPEX transaction model in that most vendors will allow you to purchase upfront on a fixed term contract, or pay month by month or quarter by quarter. A hosted Intranet also provides flexibility in upsizing and downsizing the infrastructure depending on your usage. From one year to the next, your cloud provider will also improve the underlying infrastructure of your environment without the need for you to do anything.

Against Hosted

There certainly are scenarios where the need to have your Intranet on premise outweighs the opportunity for a hosted Intranet. These may include the need to support complex integrations; the preference not to allow external traffic to your internal domain, and the nature of the type of content and data your organization manages. Depending on the technology stack of the Intranet, there may also be a preference to combine the Intranet application into an existing managed environment supported by an internal IT team.

For On Premise

That warm feeling of having all your assets tucked in under your own roof, where you can choose to integrate other internal systems safely behind your firewall and where no issue is to big to manage yourself. The benefits for hosting an Intranet on premise are obvious, and there’s a reason it’s still a preference for many over an externally hosted Intranet.

Against On Premise

While managing your Intranet on premise might add some comfort, the cost, time and effort in building, managing and refreshing infrastructure over time is being outdone by nimble, cheap and highly scalable cloud infrastructure which you can’t compete with. The move to the cloud is now commonplace, and the opportunities for accessing third party web services within your hosted Intranet environment ultimately drive greater user adoption and value around the Intranet investment.