On-premise
Fits organizations that require infrastructure within their own environment or policy boundary. It also means the organization must have clear capability for hardware, operating systems, networking, backup and recovery.
Private cloud
Can provide dedicated infrastructure with flexible scaling and remote management while preserving stronger isolation and account-level control. Cloud ownership and administrator access must still be explicit.
Support access
Decide how external support reaches production, who approves access, what is logged and how credentials are controlled. Convenience should not create permanent uncontrolled access.
Backup and recovery
Ask where backups are stored, how often they are tested, what data-loss window is acceptable and how long recovery should take.
Choose based on governance
The right answer follows legal, operational, security, cost and support requirements—not a generic preference for “cloud” or “local”.
Compare responsibilities line by line
The useful comparison is not “cloud versus server.” List who owns operating-system and database maintenance, backups, restore testing, TLS/certificates, monitoring, firewall/network changes, privileged access, security updates, storage capacity, incident response and the infrastructure evidence required during support.
A private-cloud model may move more infrastructure work to a service provider; an on-premise model may give the customer more direct control. Neither is automatically safer. Risk increases when a responsibility is assumed by both parties—or by neither.
Design support access before the first incident
Agree how support will reach the environment, who authorizes access, whether access is persistent or time-bounded, how credentials are protected and what evidence remains after the case is closed. Emergency access should not be invented during an outage.
Also decide how infrastructure and application responsibility are separated. A database outage, network rule, custom module problem and user-permission issue may require different owners even though the business experiences all four as “ERP is down.”