AMC Group: Go Cloud or On-Premise?

Go Cloud or On-Premise?

As technology moves in massive wave, it does confuse and contradict our plan to grow the business. More and more solutions are already on Software-As-A-Service or cloud platform, some ended up with no choice but to jump into the cloud band wagon.

Let's look at a typical business solution like MYOB which is the most adopted accounting solution in Singapore. More than 50% SMEs in Singapore adopted MYOB as their accounting solution. However, this solution is an On-Premise solution. Does this means there is no market for cloud accounting solution? Answer is NO, or at least adoption has yet to pick up. Online (or Cloud) solution like Xero and Quickbook-Online is coming in very aggressively.

Let us go through the pros and cons of cloud to help us decide better:

Pros:

Access anywhere and anytime for mobile workforce or travelers
Lower initial investment cost
No hardware or infrastructure involve
No long term commitment required
Easy to adopt and scale with add-on

Cons:

No asset ownership
Total cutoff if internet access fails either on hosting server or your own internet fails
Cloud server might face security issue (even some defense ministry also can get hack)
Is easy to bring data up, but is never easy to bring it down (eg. you cannot migrate from Quickbook Online to Quickbook on-premise version)
Cheap for inflexibility in features and functions, but it might add up to be more expensive if you need to add on more functions to scale up

Best of both world: Private Cloud - On-Premise yet accessible over internet

You can turn some of your solution to private cloud. How? You can deploy remote desktop solution to enable you to access from outside office all the application that are desktop based and being shared like MYOB. You host your Windows machine within office doing all necessary backup and allow access from public area can help you have full control and the best of both worlds:

Access from anywhere and anytime
When internet is down, you can access within your office (business goes on)
When server or host computer is down, access your software from any other computer first, while trying to restore your server or host computer
Not tied down to internet service provider or software vendor
You can open or close the application from the internet world (means you choose if you want to access from out of office or not)
Backup and restore is in your hands