Despite all the buzz about placing your data online, many companies still opt for the traditional route of hosting everything on internal servers. Although this means a significant investment in IT equipment, infrastructure, licenses, and support personnel, it does have some significant advantages over cloud-hosted software.
1. Compliance with Internal Data Security Policies
Any business with an IT department knows that they can be real sticklers for data security and with good reason. A single server could contain millions of dollars worth of business intelligence, confidential documents, and customer information that, if leaked or stolen, could damage the company and even open it up to litigation. This is why many IT departments prefer to host software on-premise, deep within multiple layers of firewalls, in accordance with the strict IT policies that they’ve set.
Sometimes you also might want to have complete control over your data. Perhaps you’ll sleep better knowing that your hand-picked IT team is in charge of the backups.
2. Direct Access to the Database for Using 3rd Party Reporting Tools
Data is only as useful as the information you can glean from it. Many of the most powerful third-party data processing and reporting tools work best if there is direct access to the database. While it might be possible to connect to cloud-hosted project databases (you may have to jump through several hoops to do so), direct access to an in-house database is much faster and more secure.
3. Ability to Customize Code In-House
Only some project management programs are a perfect fit out-of-the-box. When shopping for project management software, many companies would rather have a solution that can be customized to fit their needs. This can be done by purchasing the software source code and setting up an on-premise team to do the development. Once done, you’ll be able to tweak the software features and create a solution that delivers exactly what your team needs, with some additional room for growth in case your process changes.
Image credit, ?keaggy.com, Flickr
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