Why Choose Blueprint Cloud vs. On Premise ?

Updated by Tony Higgins

Blueprint is available either as a hosted service via Blueprint's Cloud, or alternatively can be installed by the customer in their own environment. There is typically one reason why some companies still opt for on-premise, their perception that it is more secure. However this is largely a misnomer since today's hosting providers are arguably the most advanced organizations in terms of securing access to customer data. Trends clearly show customers moving away from on-premise deployments in favor of Blueprint Cloud.

Below is a brief comparison showing why Blueprint Cloud is the preferred option:

Blueprint Cloud

Customer On-premise

Provisioning

Takes only minutes to provision in Blueprint's cloud. Blueprint provides customer with URL and credentials for administrator for immediate customer access.

Often takes weeks or even months. Customer needs to:

  • engage IT for server availability or procurement
  • approvals for server and infrastructure expenditure
  • application installation and configuration
  • URL and credentials for administrator access.

Updates

Blueprint delivers new releases typically every six weeks. The upgrade of a customer's instance in Blueprint Cloud requires no effort by the customer and appears instantaneously.

Customer's IT group typically needs to schedule the update. They download and install per Blueprint's installation instructions, then typically trial the update to confirm correct operation in customer's infrastructure. This needs to be repeated every release (i.e. every six weeks).

Application Maintenance

Blueprint has direct access to application and infrastructure to rapidly localize root-cause and remediate. Result is far lower down-time, and much higher system availability.

Blueprint has no direct access so has to coordinate with on-site staff to download and send log files to diagnose remotely. In worst cases, database backup is sent. Far more difficult to localize root-cause, and requires frequent participation of customer technical staff. Far more time to diagnose issue, and fewer options for remediation. Result is more down-time, and lower system availability.

Infrastructure Maintenance

Blueprint manages highly-available, redundant infrastructure including monitoring for vulnerabilities and security updates to prevent intrusions.

Infrastructure for Blueprint will need to be deployed, managed, and monitored by customer technical staff.

Environmental Issues

Blueprint cloud has a single, common infrastructure used across all customers. This makes maintenance, upgrades, and trouble-shooting far more rapid and efficient.

Each customer environment is unique which makes troubleshooting and diagnosis of issues far more difficult and can require a lot of participation of customer's technical staff.

Access to alpha/beta Software

Blueprint's application is under continuous development with builds each day and formal releases every six weeks. Blueprint is often able to make certain daily builds available for customers in Blueprint's cloud for trial use of new features under development.

The logistics, overhead, and special environments customers would require to install a daily build for trial use is usually prohibitive.

Security

Large enterprise companies in rigorously regulated industries (e.g. banking, finance, insurance, pharma) have vetted and are using Blueprint's cloud. Blueprint cloud is hosted in load-balanced, highly-scalable, highly-secure SOC II / IOS27001 compliant geographically distributed data centers. Data is completely segregated between customers, with each customer having their own dedicated SQL database, with data encrypted both in-transit (TLS 1.2) and at-rest (AES-256).

When installed on-premise Blueprint becomes part of the customer's IT infrastructure and subject to all relevant policies and procedures, including those relating to security.


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