Where you choose to manage and run your digital resources depends on your business and its requirements. It's not always an "either-or" situation, as many opt for a hybrid strategy, utilizing both the cloud and local hosting.
While there's no definitive answer to where a company should host all or part of its digital resources, we must admit to having a favourite when building solutions — the cloud. However, we want to emphasize that we don't recommend moving to the cloud "just because." If everything is running smoothly with your more traditional hosting setup, you should continue with it.
Sometimes, however, there are clear incentives to move from a more traditional infrastructure, something which we often see in large, global companies. The volume of data they handle increases each year, and what could perhaps previously run through systems overnight now encroaches on working hours. Systems and processes simply become inadequate for the data that must be managed.
In addition to optimized processes, there are several other benefits to the cloud:
In the cloud, you don't have to consider a server's limited capacity in terms of disk space, RAM, and CPU. You can let the volume increase (or decrease) without it negatively impacting on your daily work.
An area where local hosting often falls short is monitoring. Many don't know how to set it up, resulting in a lack of control over processes. In the cloud, there are services that include monitoring, providing full insight into your processes and systems.
Cloud providers often handle many parts of the infrastructure, depending on the setup you choose. Services which enable backups, maintenance, and updates are available, depending on which resources and services you choose. This allows your internal IT team to focus on expanding your ecosystem rather than maintaining it.
Using the cloud is resource-efficient as one person can take responsibility for the entire setup. Traditional IT teams often require multiple experts, such as network, database, or security specialists. Cloud adoption simplifies the overall picture.
You might be thinking - okay, but what will our IT team do if one person can take responsibility for the entire setup? A lot of other things! Instead of spending time on maintenance and patching servers in the evenings, they can build more integrations, applications, and streamline workflows. Win-win!
Despite the perceived security of controlling everything on your own server, cloud solutions offer exceptional security. Services facilitating disaster recovery routines are available, and, if set up correctly, the entire infrastructure can be defined as code (IaC), allowing a seamless transition to a new environment even if the entire cloud service goes down.
Cloud providers also have high legal requirements that they have to comply with, which means that both the physical and digital security of the part of the cloud infrastructure they are responsible for is high.
For a cloud service, you pay a monthly fee based on resource usage and the services utilized. The cost of the cloud also depends on the abstraction level chosen.
It’s also worth noting that using the cloud improperly poses a risk of costs spiralling.
The cloud doesn't just bring technological benefits for optimizing IT processes but also influences the overall strategy of a company and how it manages digital costs. As advocates of cloud solutions, we emphasize the importance of adapting the cloud to your specific needs rather than migrating "just because." If the migration is executed correctly, we promise you won't regret it.
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