On-Premises Cloud: Is It Right for Your Business?

Usually, when you think about cloud services, you might envision a third-party, such as AWS, that provides cloud computing resources from its facilities off-premises. The term on-premises cloud, therefore, might seem like an oxymoron.

An on-premises cloud refers to a type of private cloud where the customer manages the IT infrastructure on-site. A private cloud is a single-tenant cloud, meaning it serves only one customer.

This setup contrasts with the public cloud, where a third party hosts cloud infrastructure and provides services over the internet. With public cloud services, multiple customers use shared physical servers as well as other hardware and software.

In contrast, an on-premises cloud is a private cloud solution where all IT components, including virtual machines and servers, live on the customer's premises.

Below, we break down the advantages and disadvantages of the on-premises cloud.

Advantages of On-Premises Cloud

1. Control

With an on-premises cloud, you control your infrastructure, applications, and data. You set the terms of the cloud service and customize them to suit your business. With a hosted (off-site) private cloud, applications and data are processed and stored outside your facilities. 

Consequently, you have less control over management of the day-to-day operations of the data center. As a result, you will have more time to focus on your core business strategy and competency by outsourcing mundane tasks to the service provider.

2. Compliance

When using an on-premises cloud, you can more easily comply with local and country-specific data security laws and regulations. The solution simplifies data governance issues as well as data locality concerns.

3. Performance

On-premises clouds provide better performance compared to the inherent latency of internet wide-area networks used to access public clouds. The difference becomes especially relevant for High Performance Computing workloads required for chip design.

4. CapEx vs OpEx

If your business must incur certain capital expenditures during your fiscal cycles, maintaining an on-premises cloud might be important for you. If avoiding CapEx and focusing more on operational expenses is relevant for your financial strategy, a hosted or public cloud environment is a better fit.

Synopsys Cloud’s Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) Solution

Synopsys Cloud provides a “bring your own cloud” (BYOC) deployment option to chip design businesses. This option is available with the top 3 cloud providers:

• Microsoft Azure
• AWS
• Google Cloud

Using the BYOC option, you can work with the public cloud provider of your choice to maintain control over your cloud environment. Concurrently, you can take advantage of unlimited access to our cloud-based electronic design automation (EDA) tools through our FlexEDA pay-per-use pricing model. Since you have full control over your cloud environment, you can also deploy complex multi-vendor EDA flows for your chip design needs.

Synopsys Cloud also provides a SaaS deployment option for customers who want to leverage our pre-configured and optimized tool access environment, including EDA software, configuration scripts, design kits, IP, optimized HPC, and an emulation infrastructure tailored to each specific EDA workload. We have also cloud-enabled our EDA tools and optimized shared storage technology to deliver a cost-optimized HPC infrastructure.