Is Azure cloud cheaper than on premise?

You’ve probably encountered cloud platforms before, either Azure itself or a competing solution. However, whilst you may have heard the buzz about shifting your operations to the cloud, you may still be unclear as to what the precise benefits of moving away from using an on-premise solution are.

If so, keep reading, in this short article we’re going to tackle the key point that makes Azure such an attractive choice for organisations to go with.

While it may initially appear to be more expensive than any on-premise solution that you might currently be working with, using Azure, or another cloud-based solution works out significantly cheaper in the long run.

A key consideration regarding an on-site solution is that they are definitively not a one-time expense. The money spent on purchasing a high-performance sever is only the very tip of the iceberg. The major expenses are actually post-purchase in the form of governance and maintenance as well as the significant cost of the personnel needed to perform these tasks.

Once these additional costs over the server’s entire lifespan have been factored in, Azure very quickly becomes the cheaper option. The only recurring cost is the fee for the access to the resources of the cloud itself.

Furthermore, whilst it might seem logical that this major reduction in cost would entail a drop in the quality of the service, the opposite is in fact true. Even if you were to operate a phenomenally fast and powerful server yourself, the performance achieved would not, in all likelihood, be noticeably better than what you’d get from Azure.

Equally importantly, Azure allows organisations an enormous amount of flexibility in terms of scaling. Scaling an on-premise solution is a mammoth task, it requires not only the purchase of new servers but also their integration with the current solution. While this is by no means an impossible task, it is a task that requires time and manpower that could be better spent elsewhere. Moreover, any new capacity must justify itself in the long run. If a business anticipates a busy period, but then expects demand will drop to normal levels, then upscaling an on-premise solution quickly becomes less appealing.

Conversely, by using a cloud solution, such as Azure, an organisation is able to up and downscale to its heart’s content. Need extra capacity around Black Friday or a similar big event? Not a problem, you can just increase your capacity. Demand on your website or e-shop returning to normal levels after the big event? Then you can just stop paying for the additional capacity. Essentially, what this entails is that an organisation using Azure will never be paying for more than you need while also never being caught out by a lack of capacity.

Conferring the ability to react almost instantaneously to changing circumstances is why Azure is the perfect solution for so many businesses. Rather than having to commit to expensive long-term infrastructure, businesses using Azure can simply reconfigure their Azure resources to match the volume of traffic that they’re anticipating.