On-Premises Cloud Infrastructure

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What Does On-Premises Cloud Infrastructure Mean?

On-premises cloud infrastructure is a term related to cloud computing, which seems to contradict a central principle of cloud services, namely, that cloud services are typically provided off-site as a fundamental part of cloud technology design. On-premises cloud infrastructure would be hardware that is related to cloud services or activities, that is nonetheless located on-site at the client’s physical business location.

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Techopedia Explains On-Premises Cloud Infrastructure

One of the essential benefits of cloud services is that vendors typically house all of the hardware in their own data centers. Cloud services are provided over the internet, and clients typically do not need to have any physical hardware on-site, or load software onto on-premises workstations. Instead, they subscribe to cloud services through the internet, and all of the server activity takes place on the vendor's site. This leads to a number of essential cloud benefits like scalability, on-demand services and elasticity.

However, in some cases, there may be situations where clients subscribing to cloud services may keep some hardware or data on-site. The part of the infrastructure that is housed at the client’s business would be called on-premises cloud infrastructure. For example, certain types of more frequently accessed data could reside inside the client’s network, although major services and data sets are provisioned in the cloud. There are a large number of ways that on-premises cloud infrastructure could work, but on the whole, this is an unusual type of setup, because of the attractive benefits of sourcing services from off-site vendors.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist
Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.