Hi,
What do you mean by 'establishment perspective'?
The form factor nomenclature can be somewhat confusing. We offer:
- Hardware appliance
- Virtual appliance, deployed on-prem or in the cloud (AWS or Azure)
- Software, installed and connected to your database; you are probably familiar with this one already
These can be (and often are) clustered in various combinations to meet different requirements. Fundamentally they are all the same: they run whatever version of the Gateway is installed. The connected database piece is the biggest difference. In the appliance form factors you can set up your own MySQL database on the appliance; in the software you must choose a connection to a database of your own. The functionality across the different form factors is identical. All form factors provide similar reliability and scalability; there are Enterprise-scale customer examples for all variants.
Most of the other differences specific to the hardware form factor are a function of the physical or virtual device itself: you must have the hardware box to run the Hardware Security Module, and the Hardware offers a higher level of certified security (FIPS 140-2 Level 3). Also the hardware and virtual form factors tend to be easier to install and troubleshoot, because there are fewer variables to sort through when working to detect the cause of an issue.
Let me know if you need more specific information.
Cheers,
-case-