On-Premises vs. Public Cloud: Why Private Infrastructure Wins

Over the past decade, the enterprise software market has been swept by the SaaS wave. Vendors attracted customers with promises of rapid deployment, pay-as-you-go pricing, and zero operations overhead. Enterprises seemed to have only one choice—entrust their data to third parties.

But entrusting core data to third parties contradicts long-term enterprise interests! Enterprises chose SaaS because private deployment operations were too complex. But technology has advanced—private deployment is no longer expensive. Behind SaaS convenience lies data security risks, vendor lock-in, and runaway long-term costs. Enterprises should reconsider this choice.

Enterprise Data Is Inherently Private—On-Premises Is the Fundamental Requirement

Enterprise core assets are data and business knowledge. Customer information, transaction records, production processes, management workflows—these have inherent privacy and competitive value. Data sovereignty means complete control. With data on your own servers, enterprises control access permissions, backup strategies, and security measures. With data on third-party platforms, enterprises lose control over core assets and can only rely on vendor promises.

Private deployment is the fundamental requirement for enterprise applications, not a legacy choice. Enterprises turned to SaaS because technical barriers and operational costs were prohibitively high. This was a compromise, not the optimal solution.

Public Cloud SaaS: A Forced Compromise

What did private deployment mean in the past? Specialized ops teams, complex deployment processes, frequent incident response. Deploying a system took days or weeks, updating a version might require half a day of downtime. Small and medium enterprises couldn't bear such costs, and large enterprises had to invest massive budgets and personnel.

Public cloud SaaS became the alternative in this context. Vendors promised to take over operational complexity—enterprises just pay monthly and go live quickly with low initial costs. But the price? Enterprises traded data sovereignty and system control for affordable operational costs. Core data stored on vendor servers, system functionality limited by vendor capabilities, business continuity dependent on vendor service quality.

The Hidden Costs of SaaS Far Exceed Upfront Pricing

Data stored on third-party platforms faces dual risks: security and compliance. Vendor servers may be attacked, internal staff may abuse privileges, enterprises cannot truly control their data. Worse is vendor lock-in. After business systems accumulate massive data and configurations, switching platforms becomes prohibitively expensive. Data export is restricted, system functionality is entirely limited by vendor product capabilities, deep customization and integration impossible. Enterprises are effectively held hostage by vendors, losing technical autonomy.

Per-user pricing looks flexible, but long-term costs often exceed expectations. As business grows, subscription fees rise continuously. Multiple SaaS services stack up, total costs can far exceed self-hosted systems. Self-hosted investment is one-time, SaaS subscriptions are indefinite. Multi-year accumulated costs may exceed private deployment total costs. Business continuity depends on vendors—platform outages or vendor financial troubles mean enterprise systems immediately halt with no recourse. When vendors raise prices, enterprises lack bargaining power.

Modern Technology Makes On-Premises Deployment Economically Viable

Private deployment was expensive because operations were complex. But modern application platforms have built operations capabilities into systems. One-click deployment is no longer marketing speak—systems automatically detect environments, install dependencies, configure services. Application development complete means deployment complete: develop, deploy, use in real-time. Publishing upgrades is just a few simple operations on a visual interface that non-specialist IT staff can handle.

Enterprises rent one ECS from cloud vendors, install an application development, runtime, and operations management platform like JitAi, and gain a stable, controllable private environment. Beyond zero operational costs, JitAi supports seamless switching between visual development and full-code development. As business complexity grows, systems scale freely, unlike SaaS constrained by platform capability boundaries.

Enterprises should choose what kind of private deployment? Deploy applications on cloud vendor ECS—that's sufficient. No need for K8s, microservices, or container orchestration. Enterprise B2B applications have fixed user scales and predictable traffic—simple architectures fully meet requirements. Data on your own servers, costs transparent and predictable, technology fully autonomous. Private deployment is no longer expensive—it's a pragmatic solution enabled by technological progress.