I think it really depends on your applications. Someone who makes that suggestion quickly is probably out of line though and people who think of the cloud as “someone else’s hard drive” are doing it wrong. Generally speaking internal hosting of a web server is a bad idea because there are so many hosted providers who offer so much more. In my business we manage windows servers internally but we externally host our linux-based web servers.
It is really a rent vs own decision. In the situation where we rent server resources for web hosting it makes sense because the unix admin skills are hard to source internally or locally and major hosting providers have better and more reliable bandwidth. Our windows server are internal because the data movement is large enough that we benefit from LAN speeds and the data we work is sensitive enough that it makes various legal compliance issues much simpler having everything sitting within a firewall.
It could be moved offsite but the network latency to work the data would get frustrating quickly. The up side would be that employees who work from home (about half our staff) could keep working if we have a network issue in our home office, so it is a trade off.
I hope this helps give some perspective how I’ve analyzed the issue.
If it’s not broken, there may not be a need to fix it. On the other hand, have your requirements changed? I see you sent this from your iPad. Are potentially great employees passing you by because of your technology?
It’s a personal business decision based upon your requirements. We have clients on local servers and also just built an organization from ground up totally on the cloud with no central office for people or equipment. Employees and board members are scattered across many states. We can and do hire the most qualified people from anywhere in the world who fit our needs w/o a blink of the eye since we are 100% cloud-based. Technology services are a commodity now and can be based anywhere. I would not want the responsibility to keep servers/services up 24/7.
I see pharma in your email address. Security at that level may have very special requirements. Do you feel comfortable to maintain security at that level on your own. The liability may be too high to maintain your own servers and defend from the latest hack attacks unless you have no connection with outside services or the internet. If you have any remote services, that could provide access for a security breach.
I don’t want liability for credit cards so we use third party processors. Credit card risk may be peanuts versus pharma risk/exposure. Again, it depends upon your needs; size of company, high security levels, location of employees, flexibility to work anywhere/anytime and the list goes on.
Develop a plan for the next 5 years and see what services serve your needs to remain competitive and in business.
You’re right. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
The potential gains you could get from moving to the cloud are:
1. the ability to add new servers quickly
2. greater potential reliability (since data centers have power backup and redundant internet connections)
3. potential savings in IT salaries, since you would not need to maintain staff to manage the servers
4. access to some additional technologies like Amazon’s Elastic Map Reduce and DynamoDB
Now ask yourself if any of these are problems that need to be solved.
Do you often find yourself needing to add a new server or two to handle excess load or run new services? Have you had problems with your systems not being available due to power or connectivity outages? Is it costing you a substantial amount of money to keep your current system up and running? Do you have some special need that your current system does not serve that one of these cloud technologies does serve?
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If these things aren’t broken, don’t fix them.
In companies I’ve worked with, we’ve found that cloud hosting is great when you need a lot of flexibility. That is, when you need to add and remove servers frequently to handle changes in traffic volume or to handle periodic intensive tasks.
For stable usage– those servers you know you are going to run all the time– self-hosting is cheaper.
My current company runs a dozen or so servers. We found it made sense to move two of them to an external hosting facility because they are public-facing servers and must be available 24/7, even when power goes out. Pure “cloud” hosting options like AWS and Azure were much more expensive than co-locating for the amount of computing power we were using.
Remember that in the cloud, you pay according the resources you use. More CPU, more memory, more disk space, more traffic all cost more money. When you’re running your own systems, you pay once for the CPU, memory & disk. You don’t pay extra for it every month.
I just wanted to chime in a bit here… Cloud is a nebulous term, if you don’t mind the pun. When someone says move to or use the cloud it can mean a number of things. I feel what I’ve read here so far mainly touches on infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). IaaS is not the first place I would look to help a typical corporate IT department.
I deal with folks who sell the “Cloud” as any of a number of things (as in, anything not on your LAN that they want to sell you), so I like to get people thinking about what cloud means in terms of some good definitions. Cloud comes in several basic flavors:
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): You buy infrastructure in units of compute (roughly, a VM with CPU, RAM, I/O, and some disk), bandwidth, disk, file, and network. Examples: Amazon, RackSpace, Google.
Software as a Service (SaaS): You buy units of software priced in different ways: features, users, storage of data, etc. Examples: Microsoft Office 365, Google Apps, Dropbox, Salesforce, Workday, Evernote, Crashplan, Atlassian OnDemand, (this is a big and growing space…)
Platform as a Service (PaaS): You buy units of capacity or performance in some cohesive platform that lets you rapidly develop, deploy, and scale functionality by bootstrapping off the platform services and focusing your development mainly on your domain. Examples: Heroku, Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, Google App Engine, Salesforce (again).
With each of these choices, you can have private models (all the hardware/config is inside your network), public models (Amazon), and hybrid models (some public, some private).
Additionally, “Cloud” implies a several important attributes: self-service, on-demand, broadly accessible, charged based on usage, and capable of rapid scaling and tearing down of resources (elasticity). If these are missing, you might have a faux-cloud. Just as an example, if you purchase e-mail from a “cloud” provider, and they require you to sign a contract, call tech support to add users, or can’t add 100 new users in automated fashion nearly instantaneously, you’re probably not using a “real” cloud service.
So for your business, just as an example, you might benefit from the cloud by moving your users to Office365, Outlook.com, and Skydrive (SaaS solutions), which theoretically could allow you to forget about managing servers and licenses, and shut down a significant number of the ones you have (AD, Exchange, File, etc). This might allow you to simplify your IT strategy by enabling a more mobile workforce, focusing more on commodity bandwidth as a variable cost, and reducing capital expenditures on IT assets, and also electrical consumption costs to boot.
I agree with Duane’s recommendation about planning. Think about the services your IT provides to your company (file, print, HR systems, email, etc.), and not so much the IT assets (servers, disk, etc). If the cloud services meet your needs safely, with features you want, and at an acceptable cost, then you can think about switching. Then consider how this affects the financial bottom-line for your company in terms of any cost savings, or least how it will change your spending (e.g. shifting from cap-ex expenses to variable costs, and IT staffing).