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# Understand the differences between cloud and on-prem

> Compare deployment models to choose the right option.

Itential Platform is available as a fully managed cloud service or as a self-hosted on-premises deployment. The two models differ in who manages the infrastructure, how environments are licensed, and how connectivity to on-premises resources is established.

## Deployment model comparison

|                                           | Itential Platform Cloud                                                                                      | Itential Platform on-premises                                                                   |
| ----------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Hosting and management**                | Itential-hosted and managed                                                                                  | Customer self-hosted and managed                                                                |
| **License includes**                      | Three environments: development, staging, and production                                                     | One production server, one active high-availability server, and one non-production server       |
| **Applications and backend**              | Itential managed                                                                                             | Customer managed, including dependencies such as Redis and MongoDB                              |
| **Host OS**                               | Itential managed                                                                                             | Customer managed; supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)-based and Amazon Linux distributions |
| **Connectivity to on-premises resources** | Secure IP-based VPN or AWS PrivateLink                                                                       | IPSec-based VPN                                                                                 |
| **Cloud Hub**                             | Centralized portal for accessing environments, monitoring jobs and tasks, analytics, and user administration | Not available                                                                                   |

Itential Gateway is customer-hosted on-premises in both deployment models.

> Compare deployment models to choose the right option.