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For years, one of the biggest questions IT teams had to ask themselves when planning a new deployment was, Should we use cloud or on-prem? Today, the cloud computing vs. on premises decision is becoming less and less important. The differences between cloud and on-premises environments have grown increasingly irrelevant from the perspective of application developers and IT engineers.

I know: That may sound like a bold statement to IT pros who are accustomed to thinking of the cloud and on prem as two distinct universes. But I think its time to change that perspective. Heres why the cloud computing vs. on premises question no longer matters in the way it once did.

Historically, cloud-based environments and on-premises environments were markedly different in a number of key ways:

There were plenty of other differences separating on prem from cloud environments, but these tended to be the ones that got the most attention as businesses considered whether to use the cloud.

Today, many of these differences have become negligible or disappeared altogether.

Take pricing models, for one. Its no longer the case that the cloud is the only place to find pay-as-you-go pricing. Center vendors offer the same pricing structure for on-prem resources that customers deploy in their own data centers.

(Tangentially, its also worth noting that there was never anything stopping businesses from taking out loans to spread out their on-prem infrastructure costs over time--a fact that always seemed to elude folks who got excited about clouds supposedly unique CapEx cost advantages.)

That doesnt mean all on-prem resources can be paid for on a monthly basis with no upfront capital expense, of course. But it does mean that if your business doesnt want to dump six- or seven-figure sums into its IT infrastructure all at once, its possible to find solutions that spread the cost out over time without requiring use of public cloud.

At this point, the idea that the cloud is less secure because it provides less isolation has been proved false. There have been no major cyberattacks that were made possible by the specific architectures of shared cloud infrastructure, and no examples of security events spilling over from one users account to another.

Indeed, you could make a good case today that the cloud tends to be more secure than on prem. Cloud providers IAM frameworks enable more granular access control than most on-prem environments can support. Cloud providers also tend to be better at keeping their environments patched, and at following security best practices, than teams that manage on-prem infrastructure.

Likewise, youd sound almost silly today if you argued that most businesses just cant meet compliance requirements in the cloud. All of the major cloud providers maintain sophisticated compliance programs to ensure that their infrastructure and services meet compliance rules. And I am not aware of any compliance framework that explicitly disallows use of the cloud.

Today, its just as easy--if not easier--to comply with data security, privacy and other mandates in the cloud as it is on prem.

Its still true that the cloud is, in general, easier to scale than an on-prem environment.

However, the advent of a new generation of hybrid cloud platforms, like AWS Outposts and Azure Stack, makes it possible to set up on-prem environments that teams can seamlessly and instantly extend with cloud-based infrastructure when the need arises.

In other words, you could use a framework like Azure Stack to host your workloads on prem, then add IaaS resources from the Azure public cloud to accommodate spikes in demand. In this sense, scaling on-prem infrastructure no longer necessarily requires time-consuming and expensive acquisition of new hardware.

From the perspective of deployment and management, many workloads today look the same whether they run on prem, in the public cloud or in a hybrid model.

Thats thanks to the proliferation of platforms like Kubernetes, which abstract away underlying infrastructure and provide a consistent deployment experience no matter where applications are run. If you host your apps in containers (or even VMs, which Kubernetes can also orchestrate), the deployment and management process is going to look and feel basically the same whether your host infrastructure is on-prem servers, public cloud IaaS or a combination thereof.

To be sure, the differences between cloud environments and on-prem environments still matter in some cases, for some types of workloads. Its not as if the cloud vs. on-prem question has become totally irrelevant.

On the whole, though, this issue matters much less than it once did. Just as the differences among Linux, Windows and Mac workstations have become less important in an age when most applications run inside a web browser and work with any OS, there is less at stake today in deciding between the cloud and on-prem.

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Cloud Computing vs. On Premises: The Diminishing Differences - ITPro Today