On Prem vs Cloud?

[michael79]

Hey,

So I work with a security minded company, who generally in the past has been burned by cloud services (we have around 1600 corp employees). We are looking at Jamf for our growing Mac population.

I'm curious for those that run on prem, how do you like it? Any regrets from not going cloud based? What was your selling point to be on prem vs cloud? Just trying to get some information on all angles before we go to deeply into things. Any information or tips are appreciated.

[mark_mahabir]

There wasn't a cloud option when we first purchased Jamf, and until recently the pricing for cloud was a lot more expensive than on-prem. Now that the pricing is almost identical we will be looking to migrate prior to our next renewal.

It'll be nice not to have to manage those MySQL and Java updates ourselves....

[Lotusshaney]

On premise allows you access to the MySQL database you can’t get with cloud hosting at Jamf.

[tomhastings]

I have worked at four different locations that all were on premises. At three of those locations, everything functioned perfectly and Jamf support was always there to help with issues.
Overall I would prefer cloud for the following reasons: - Jamf manages the back end. They want you to be successful so you will rarely, if ever, have any problems. - Apple and Jamf are very careful when it comes to security and will be able to overcome any concerns of internal network security. - When new features are rolled out in Jamf Pro, you will have them within a couple weeks instead of waiting for the server team to install and test.

[gachowski]

My vote is cloud, we are beyond happy with service. I think ours has only been down 1 time in over 4 years, and it was our issue. It went down during "my evening" and our backup jamf admin called it in and work with Jamf to get it resolved before I woke up. Jamf also evaluated why it went down and planned specific maintenance to insure it won't happen again.

As Tom pointed out some of this is control too, you get to manage the service so your not limited by internal teams..

I think one of the most important things of a successful macOS user experience is the speed at that you can adapt and implement Apple changes, hosted Jamf is as close as you are going to get to day of Apple release.

C

[gskibum]

I have seen first-year pricing is about the same, but what about subsequent year renewals? Off the top of my head that's costing only something like $20.00/year for macOS renewals for on-prem while cloud price is first-year every year.

Edit: I will need to look at pricing again if I am way off target with the above.

[landon_Starr]

If you ignore pricing, I've experienced more issues as a cloud customer that are ultimately out of my control then when I was on-prem.

It is nice not having to worry about the backend stuff like upgrades, certs, etc, but managing those things were never a huge pain for me.

[gachowski]

I haven't checked Windows management cost lately, but a few people that post here and some of our internal staff say that hosted jamf is significantly less than Windows. The two times cost has come up in the past 17 years I have asked what the windows cost was and the questions about Jamf cost just magically went away. best tool for the job.

C

I think more and more about the total cost of windows in our org and i'm kinda sure with O365 pricing and the special/custom stuff to get windows to work with other systems.... I now think there is a Microsoft enterprise tax.

[sudoErase]

Could we get an estimate of Jamf On-Prem vs Jamf Cloud? 

From what I know, Jamf On-Prem is significantly cheaper than Jamf Cloud. 
Please correct me if I am wrong:
Jamf on Prem:
$99 device for new devices
$20/device/year for renewal
Jamf Cloud:
average $75/device/year

Aside from the Jamf on prem startup cost and cloud startup cost or migration cost. The focus here is Renewal cost would be significantly different, please correct me if I'm wrong.

Using values above, (note: I do know some gets less or more depedning on the quote)
Scenario: 300 machines + 50 new machines
On Prem:
300 * $20 = $6,000
50 * $99 = $4,999
50 * 20 = $1000
Total: $21,999

Cloud:
350 * 75 = $26,250

While the above cost shows only 5k difference, if the next year - the following year, the users are relatively the same:

On Prem:

350 * 20 = $7,000

Cloud:
350 * 75 = $26,250

[mark_mahabir]

I'm in education and we're looking at migrating to the cloud in Q3 when our renewal is due.

We've been quoted exactly the same price as staying on-prem plus the migration fee (around $1000).