On-premise or cloud, and how to tell which suits your property
Cloud is the default answer now, and for a great many hotels it is the right one. This page is about the properties where it is not, and how to tell which kind you are.
We build an on-premise system, so we have an interest here. We have tried to write the parts that argue against us as carefully as the parts that argue for us.
The question is not really about software
Ask which is better, cloud or on-premise, and you will get an answer about technology. That is the wrong level to decide it at.
The useful question is narrower. When your internet connection fails, on the worst day of the year rather than an average one, what do you still need to be able to do? Answer that honestly and the architecture mostly chooses itself.
For a city hotel with fibre and a second line on a different physical route, the answer is often "nothing much, it will be back in twenty minutes". For a resort at the end of a single cable, on an island, in the wet season, it is a different answer.
What cloud does well
We would rather set this out properly than wave at it.
- There is no server to buy, and no server to replace in five or six years when it becomes the oldest thing in the building.
- Updates arrive without you scheduling them or paying for them separately.
- You can look at last night's figures from anywhere, without anyone setting up remote access first.
- Adding a second or third property is a smaller job, because there is nothing physical to repeat.
- The vendor carries the backups, the patching and the hardware failures. For a property with no technical staff, that is a genuine transfer of risk.
Those are real advantages. If your connection is solid and your operation is straightforward, they may well settle it.
What cloud costs you, beyond the subscription
The disadvantages are quieter, which is why they tend to be discovered later rather than considered first.
- You are renting, permanently. The price is not yours to set and it does not stop.
- You do not choose when an update lands, or what it changes about a screen your staff use fifty times a day.
- Your front desk is only as capable as your connection at its worst, not its average.
- If the vendor is acquired, changes direction or retires the product, your timetable becomes theirs.
- Your data sits somewhere else, under someone else's arrangements, which matters more in some jurisdictions than others.
None of that is an argument against cloud by itself. It is an argument for knowing which of them you are accepting.
Cloud is somebody else's server, not a different kind of thing
This gets lost in the way cloud is talked about. There is no cloud. There is a server, in a building, owned by somebody who is not you, and the difference that matters is not that it is more modern. It is who can reach it.
A cloud system has to be reachable from the public internet, because that is how you reach it. So it is reachable by everyone else as well, all the time, including the people running automated scans for known weaknesses in exactly the software it runs. That is not a criticism of any particular vendor. It is what being on the internet means.
An on-premise system is reachable from the devices on your own network. That is a smaller number of machines, and you know roughly what they are. The people who can attempt to reach your property management system are, more or less, the people who can get onto your office network.
Two things have to be said honestly alongside that, or the argument is worth nothing.
The first is that a serious cloud vendor employs people whose entire job is keeping that server patched, monitored and separated from its neighbours. Most hotels do not employ anybody like that. A large exposed surface, professionally defended, can genuinely be safer than a small one that nobody looks at. An on-premise server that has not been patched in four years, with remote desktop opened to the internet because it was convenient one weekend, is worse than any reputable cloud system. That configuration is common, and it throws away the entire advantage.
The second is that the advantage is yours to keep or discard. Remote access is useful and we offer it, but every route in that you open is a route in. If you add one, add it through a VPN rather than by forwarding a port, and treat that decision as the security decision it is rather than a convenience setting.
The honest position is this. On-premise gives you a much smaller attack surface, and hands you the responsibility for not undoing that. Cloud gives you a larger one, professionally managed, and takes the responsibility away. Which suits you depends less on the technology than on whether anyone at your property will actually do the maintenance.
What on-premise does well
An on-premise system runs on a server in your building. The shape of the trade-off is the mirror image.
- When the line drops, the things happening inside the building carry on. Check a guest in, open a table, post a charge, mark a room clean. The system is in the same building as the people using it.
- You buy it once rather than renting it for as long as you use it.
- You decide when to upgrade, and you can decide not to this year.
- The data is on your premises, which for some owners is the whole argument.
- Performance does not vary with someone else's network. A busy morning at reception behaves the same as a quiet afternoon.
What on-premise costs you
The same honesty applies in this direction.
- The hardware is yours. It ages, and one day it fails, usually inconveniently.
- Backups are your responsibility rather than an assumption. This is the one people underestimate, and it is the one that turns a bad week into a catastrophe.
- Remote access is something you set up deliberately rather than something you get for free.
- A major upgrade is a project with a date attached, not something that happens quietly overnight.
- If nobody on site is comfortable with a server, you need a supplier who actually answers the phone.
That last point is not a small one, and it is worth being blunt about. An on-premise system with an absent supplier is worse than a cloud system with an absent supplier, because more of the responsibility sits with you. It is the reason we treat after-sales support as part of the product rather than an add-on to it.
Be honest about what still needs the internet
This is where a lot of on-premise marketing quietly overclaims, so we will be specific.
An on-premise property management system does not make your hotel independent of the internet. It makes the parts that happen inside the building independent of it. Several important things still stop when the connection does.
- Your channel manager cannot reach the online travel agents, so rates and availability sit and wait. Nothing is lost, but nothing moves either. We connect through a channel manager rather than to each agent directly, and the reasons for that are worth reading if you are comparing systems.
- Card payment authorisation needs the connection, the same as it does on any system.
- Email confirmations queue rather than send.
- Anyone working remotely is working remotely on nothing.
What keeps running is reception, the restaurant, the bar, housekeeping, reporting and the accounts. On a bad day, that is most of what a hotel actually is.
Where the line falls in practice
Roughly where the infrastructure stops being boring.
If you are on an island, or at the end of a single cable, or somewhere the power flickers through the wet season, the calculation changes. It changes again if your backup connection turns out to run through the same physical duct as your primary one, which is more common than people expect once they ask the question properly rather than accepting the answer on the order form.
We say this from a particular vantage point. We support properties in Indonesia and Thailand, including islands, and the outage question is not hypothetical to any of them.
Some of those properties have now had good connectivity for years, and have kept the architecture anyway. Not out of inertia. The reason they chose it has not stopped being true, and a system that keeps working when the line drops is worth something even in a year when the line does not drop.
A fair summary
If you have reliable connectivity, no technical staff, several properties and a preference for renting rather than owning, cloud is probably right for you and you should not let anyone talk you out of it on principle. The security argument cuts your way too: better somebody else's professionals than a server in your office that nobody updates.
If you are a single property or a small group, in a place where the infrastructure occasionally lets you down, and you would rather own the thing that runs your business, on-premise still makes sense. You keep working when the line drops, and the machine holding your guest data is reachable from your office rather than from everywhere. It has not been superseded. It has been unfashionable, which is a different thing.
Resort Manager is on-premise. It handles reservations, the front desk, point of sale, stock and the accounts in one system, in two editions depending on the size of the property, with add-ons for the interfaces a particular hotel actually needs. Some properties have been running it for more than sixteen years.
If you are weighing this up and want an argument rather than a pitch, including the case for staying where you are, changing your property management system covers what the move actually involves. Tell us how you operate and we will tell you honestly whether it suits you.
Ready to experience the benefits of Resort Manager for yourself?
Contact us today to schedule a demo or learn more about our software.