Companies are relentlessly searching for improved measures to maximize their cloud potential in order to gain competitive advantage over their competitors. And, many of them believe that they can only derive best results by developing fully customized applications in-house.
Both developing personalized application and synchronizing applications to cloud have advantages as well as disadvantages and a company needs to evaluate all its options to determine the best strategy for itself.
Advantages of Developing Your Apps
You may consider building personalized business applications in the following cases:
- When you have limited or small requirement for a project that needs immediate solution. But this should be your option for a requirement that has arisen unexpectedly. This must demand only a portion of your resource and manpower and mustn’t sap your IT budget.
- When the problem is of highly unusual nature and you are not likely to receive an immediate solution for it in the market.
- To resolve a “stand-alone” problem that is unlikely to affect your overall operation and doesn’t require integration with other software platforms.
- When the company has a large team of self-reliant IT professionals that can undertake tasks like developing custom applications for the business.
Disadvantages of Developing Your Apps
Developing customized apps can put forward certain complications which have forced companies to adopt cloud based service to improve their ROI. The limitations of building in-house applications are listed below:
Resource crunch
Most companies of recent time suffer from resource crunch and undertaking a project to custom build application will demand a fully functioning, dedicated IT department. It defies the purpose of adopting cloud, which is to reduce budgetary expenses on IT.
Time
In-house projects take longer time to get implemented. The IT team will need time to apprehend your complete operation process in order to build a mission-critical application. On the other hand, cloud computing consulting firms possess required expertise and market exposure to build an application apt for your market vertical.
Employee retention
If you don’t have an IT team that has stayed with the company for a long time you are likely to run into a risk of delaying your project every time there is an exit or new recruitment. Further, you would need to make the difficult choice of divulging critical information to not-so-trusted employees.
Cost
Developing custom applications is costlier than buying one and when your objective is to improve ROI it doesn’t make a wise choice. The cost involves acquiring resources, investing in new hardware and networking equipments, paying salaries to the developers, maintaining and managing applications in future etc. with cloud-based applications often these factors are taken care of by the service provider.
No commercial return
Unless you are a software development firm and are not likely to sale the product you have developed to earn revenue there is no immediate commercial benefit for you in developing the application by investing large amount of resource and manpower to it.
Updates
Technology and business are changing continuously, so a cutting-edge app developed today can become outdated tomorrow. In order to keep reaping benefits from your application you would need to keep updating it on a regular basis. You can be relieved of this burden with hosted application services as the providers keep updates regularly available for its clients.
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