Cloud Or On-Premise HR Solutions? Key Aspects To Consider

Over the past years, cloud technology has strongly reinforced its position in the market as the new leading support technology. Amongst its benefits are new opportunities for applications and the ability to accelerate deployments through standardised processes. As every firm has its own needs and approach, however, many are struggling with a dilemma: how and where exactly to begin cloud implementation? Others will be considering continuing to use their existing on-premise software.

All of this begs the question: on-premise or cloud—which is the best deal?

Assess your capabilities and strategy

Read one or two of our earlier articles to review the pros and cons of cloud computing. Ultimately, your decision should rest on an analysis of your business.

Here are a few key points to consider:

Hosting: where should my information be stored? An on-premise solution will allow you to manage your data better since you'll be the main owner of the solution, with decision-making power over it. You'll be ensured full data accessibility as long as you have an internal specialist. With a public cloud solution, data is stored outside of your organisation in data centres clearly identified when you sign the contract with the solution provider. The coding language will be unique to the software you are buying, meaning that data accessibility will be more complex since the IT architecture won't have been built by your IT department. A private cloud will be more costly, but will allow you to choose the data server you want to use. You'll be able to track where your data is stored, and to have constant use of this room which would help, for example, prevent performance issues.

Find a suitable pricing model: of the above models, two have a similar pricing model (public and private cloud), which is mainly built on recurring license fees. This recurrence allows you to forecast the cost by user, as well as to complete financial projections. In contrast, the main source of cost for on-premise solutions is the IT functional set-up, which is difficult to quantify. Review the stakeholders of your HR transformation: a final aspect to consider is the implementation time of these options, which will affect costs. In the on-premise model, a large room must be dedicated to IT which means a larger implementation cost, whereas the cloud solution, being standardised, requires more room for HR.

Manage your risks going into the cloud

As with every strategy, the risks of each...