Background
The open source digital platform CommCare enables frontline organizations to build their own custom, permanent solutions on a professionally managed foundation - at any scale, anywhere. CommCare was originally developed by Dimagi, and today has evolved into being one of the most widely deployed Global Goods in existence.
CommCare HQ is a sophisticated, distributed software application, made up of dozens of processes and several pieces of third-party open source database software. It has been built for performance, reliability, security, and scale rather than simplicity. The vast majority of CommCare deployments use the global CommCare Cloud hosted instances of CommCare HQ via Dimagi’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. This approach removes the need for the project to manage its own CommCare instance and also guarantees service availability and access to the latest platform features and security compliance with HIPAA and SOC-2. You can read more about the security and privacy standards offered by CommCare as a cloud-hosted solution at https://dimagi.atlassian.net/wiki/x/S4Hvh.
Thousands of governments and organizations run their CommCare applications as a cloud-hosted solution. While there are definitive benefits to hosting CommCare via the cloud, certain organizations or governments may opt to run CommCare on their own self-hosted or administered server. This may be due to a variety of reasons, including an organization’s policies or regulations. Numerous organizations and governments have successfully transitioned their CommCare applications from being hosted by Dimagi’s SaaS platform to an independently hosted instance of CommCare, without any required support from Dimagi.
Transition Your CommCare Infrastructure
Dimagi has developed this guide (Transition to On Premise Hosted CommCare) to support interested organizations in transitioning their cloud-hosted CommCare applications to self-hosted and administered servers. This is written specifically for organizations who are either directly overseeing the transition between environments or are supporting a third-party (often a government).
Numerous organizations have followed these steps to independently transition their CommCare applications without requiring any support from Dimagi.
Popular Option: Hybrid Hosting
Hybrid Hosting realizes the benefits of CommCare’s secure, stable and scalable platform while also permanently storing data in-country on a designated data storage server. Hybrid Hosting uses a cloud-based project space for application building, user management, synchronization and integration, while using the open-source CommCare Sync tool to keep data synchronized to an in-country database which acts as a primary data store.
You can read more about Hybrid Hosting in this document:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CX4VJeJkuA0VTPrYyRZZBnkDp6XRLMUDxdNHsLBVCns/edit#heading=h.x2ro0b4phek9Additional Resources
CommCare Cloud is Dimagi's self-hosting toolkit for deploying and maintaining CommCare servers. Below are helpful resources for utilizing CommCare Cloud: