Cloud ERP vs On-Premise ERP: Which Is Better?
ERP has three main deployment models: on premises, cloud-based and hybrid, a combination of the two. Hybrid clouds have always been somewhat of a mushy area. For that reason, this article focuses on comparing on-premises systems with one important cloud computing option, SaaS, in which an organization subscribes to a service delivered over the internet.
There are two main types of SaaS. In the multi-tenant model, each customer’s data is segregated, but the same application, database and underlying infrastructure serve multiple customers. With single-tenant SaaS, each customer gets its own instance of the application and database.
While there are many flavors of cloud — including hosted, public, managed and hybrid — SaaS is an increasingly popular option to replace on-premises ERP systems. This article mostly compares the multi-tenant style of SaaS ERP with on-premises ERP. While single-tenant SaaS has much of the scalability, convenience and ease of use of all SaaS applications, it usually adds costs and maintenance responsibilities that are mostly absent from multi-tenant SaaS.