As you contemplate various elements of your IPTV DRM solution, your hosting location may be one of the critical ones that come to mind. You may have heard the terms “on-prem” or “in the cloud.” 

While the latter may be a little clearer with the popularity that the cloud continues to gain, what does on-prem mean? How can you decide which is more appropriate for you? Well, you've come to the right place for clarity.

Below, you get some insight into what an on-prem deployment would look like versus a cloud deployment. Additionally, there are a couple of nuggets of information to help you contrast these, which should be perfect for applying the principles to your unique situation and making an informed business decision.

On-prem Deployment

There is a host of equipment required to bring your IPTV (News - Alert) solution to fruition. Server infrastructure, network infrastructure, and other crucial elements of the puzzle.

An on-prem deployment is more traditional. It would see your attempt to acquire all the necessary equipment, placing it in your local data center(s), and serving up your application from there.

Of course, you will need a competent team to handle updates, maintenance, etc.

The maintenance has different segments. For example, the maintenance of:

• The physical infrastructure, which means ensuring that warranty concerns are taken care of, defective parts are replaced, new systems are brought in as needed, etc. 
• Your application. You need to update it frequently, add new features, and generally enhance it.

With all of this, you also need to think about the overheads associated with running all that equipment. For example:

• You must maintain a constant internal environment. Server machinery can reach some incredibly high temperatures and inadequate cooling is not provided consistently. Should this happen, you can end up with temporary or even permanent damage to your systems, which would cause your IPTV solution to go down. Of course, the effect on uptime would be consistent until you were able to get things stabilized again.
• Electricity is another overhead that is probably going to be the bane of your existence. A lot of power is required to run data center equipment, which means you could be looking at some incredibly hefty bills.
• Since you are running this service over the internet, you must ensure that the connections to your data center are the best-in-class. This means you are likely going to have to opt for fiber connections, which are also very expensive.
• You would have to manually set up any redundancy. So, if you want to maintain the high availability of your IPTV solution, it may be a good idea to have more than one data center. Therefore, if a natural disaster or act of terror destroys one of your data centers partially or fully, your services would be up and running because you have at least one backup center elsewhere.

The general idea here is that everything necessary to run your IPTV solution will need to be carefully strategized, implemented, and managed as your business would have sole responsibility for all of it.

Pros of the On-prem Deployment

• Greater control over equipment selected
• No jurisdiction considerations but your own
• Data is all in-house
• Great for businesses that prefer a CAPEX model

Cons of the On-prem Deployment

• Quite costly for larger businesses
• The level of responsibility creates difficulties
• HA capabilities are often limited

Cloud Deployment

Cloud deployments, on the other hand, would remove much of the responsibility from your team.

Technically speaking, physical data centers would still be running the infrastructure, but they would not be yours. You effectively pay the provider to run your systems from their data centers. By doing so, you get better uptime, better infrastructure, higher availability, greater redundancy, etc., than you could with your local systems. 

You are provided remote access to the systems, allowing you to run your applications without ever having to think about the infrastructure behind the scenes. The cloud service provider handles all the maintenance, overheads, etc.

As indicated before, there are three different models. So, let’s take a quick look at them:

• Infrastructure-as-a-service, or IaaS. Here, the cloud provider takes care of nothing but the physical infrastructure. For example, you will still get access to the server operating systems, and you will be responsible for all software-side updates to it, its management, as well as the management of your application. The cloud vendor here is stripping away nothing but the physical aspect.
• Platform-as-a-service, or PaaS. The vendor assumes responsibility for the physical layer as well as the operating system. In this case, you have no interaction with the servers at the operating system level. You simply bring your application and that would be the only thing you have responsibility for updating and maintaining.
• Software-as-a-service, or SaaS (News - Alert). You purchase a pre-built solution and worry about no maintenance at all. This is what you will do if you subscribe to a pre-built IPTV solution.

Regardless of which cloud deployment model you choose, there is a subscription fee that may be paid monthly or annually.

Pros of Cloud Deployment

• Highly suitable for businesses that prefer the OPEX (News - Alert) model
• Much less responsibility for the underlying technology
• Different models and subscription types to best align with business needs
• Elimination of overheads
• Reduced staffing needs

Cons of Cloud Deployment

• Data subject to the jurisdiction of the provider
• Less control over underlying systems
• Cost savings are much smaller or non-existent for smaller workloads

Choosing the Right Deployment Model

Your choice of the right deployment model depends on a couple of factors, as all of them are not appropriate for everyone. 

There's the matter of management. If you don't have that many systems, then you're not going to feel much value from having them managed on your behalf.

If you are looking for cost savings and you have a huge team managing a lot of equipment, then offloading that to a cloud provider could save you quite a bit in the long run.

Uptime is very important to an IPTV solution, and it is near impossible to use a local data center to achieve the same kind of uptime that you can with the cloud.

Maybe you are aware of an existing IPTV solution that you see as way more reliable than any piece of custom-written software you could put together. If this is the case, then you may want to subscribe to a cloud provider.

Final Remarks

Choosing to go cloud or on-prem is not a decision to be taken lightly. Think about the pros and cons of each and apply them to your business needs, so you don't have any regrets about your choice.