Build or buy, that is the question

For IT leaders who need to move fast without breaking governance.

If you’re running IT for a bank, a SaaS company, or a Higher education institution, you’re carrying a brutal balancing act on your shoulders. 

On one side, your developers are pushing for autonomy, velocity, and the freedom to ship. On the other hand, you’re on the hook for governance, compliance, security, cost controls, and now that AI has entered the chat, innovation at scale.

Let’s just call it like it is: that’s a lot.

The reality: you’re supporting everyone, everywhere.

Your job is to ensure developers have the resources and tooling they need to serve customers, fast, reliably, and safely. That means:

• Making it easy for teams to build and deploy.
• Keeping environments standardized.
• Protecting data, ensuring compliance, and enforcing governance.
• Doing all of it with finite people, time, and budget.
   

But instead of leading the organization forward, you're spending more time chasing infrastructure:

• Cloud workloads are scattered across services
• On-prem systems, you still can’t retire
• Point solutions for edge cases and legacy apps
• Three different dashboards, four vendors, and too many SLAs.

It’s all “just the plumbing,” but the plumbing keeps clogging. And every new initiative adds another layer of complexity.

And then your boss asks: “So… what are we doing with AI?”

You’re already underwater, and now leadership wants a full AI strategy, yesterday.

You want to experiment. You want to innovate. But with infrastructure fires burning everywhere, it feels like you’re constantly reacting rather than steering. The backlog grows, innovation slows, and your team gets stretched even thinner.

You can’t keep going like this.  But what’s the alternative?

The big decision: build or buy?

Do you invest in building out your own internal platform to standardize environments?

Or do you lean on a PaaS, what Gartner now calls a Cloud Application Platform, to offload the heavy lifting? Like everything in tech leadership, the answer isn’t black and white. Here’s a clear-eyed breakdown.

Option 1: build your own internal platform

Pros

 You choose the stack, the tooling, and how everything integrates.

 When you build it, it naturally mirrors your security model, compliance structure, and workflows.

 A well-run internal platform can become a competitive advantage. If you have the capacity to maintain it.

Cons

✘ It’s a massive investment

 You’re not just building once, you’re maintaining forever. You’ll need a platform team with ongoing resourcing.

✘ Technical debt piles up fast

 Every custom integration becomes another thing that only one person on the team understands.

✘ Innovation slows

 Your most senior engineers spend their days managing infrastructure—not enabling developers or delivering business value.

✘ Hard to scale consistently

 More teams + more services = more entropy. Standardization becomes a moving target.
 

Option 2: Use a PaaS / Cloud Application Platform

Pros

 Provisioning, scaling, backups, observability, security, and updates are offloaded.

 Every environment follows the same patterns, which protect compliance and accelerate onboarding.

 They focus on code, not configuration or infra babysitting.

 Your team can finally tackle AI, modernization, and customer-facing initiatives.

Cons

✘ Requires a mindset shift

 Some organizations struggle with handing off infrastructure responsibilities to a vendor.

✘ Less control at the lowest layer

 If you need kernel-level tweaks, this model isn’t the right fit.

✘ Vendor dependency

You need a partner you can trust for stability, SLAs, and long-term alignment.

So… build or buy?

Here’s the straight truth:

If infrastructure management is not your competitive differentiator, you shouldn’t be sinking most of your time and budget into it.

Your real differentiator is delivering value to your customers through software, experiences, and innovation. For most organizations operating in hybrid environments, facing compliance pressures and resource constraints, a Cloud Application Platform can reduce operational burden enough to change the team's trajectory materially.

And that’s exactly where Upsun comes in.

Where Upsun fits in

Upsun is a Cloud Application Platform purpose-built for organizations that need speed and control. 

We give IT teams a standardized, automated, governance-first platform so developers can build and deploy across cloud and on-prem environments, without creating chaos.

With Upsun, you get:

• A consistent, production-grade platform across all apps and environments.
• Automated governance and compliance are baked into every workflow.
• Developer self-service without compromising security.
• AI-ready foundations, so exploring new capabilities doesn’t become another infrastructure project.
• A massive reduction in operational overhead so your team can finally focus on innovation.
   

The choice isn’t really “build or buy.” It’s whether you want your team investing in platform maintenance… or in delivering value that moves the business. 

If you're ready to shift from keeping the lights on to driving strategic outcomes, Upsun is built for exactly that.