Where To Host Data – On The Cloud Or Inside The Office?

Where To Host DataWeb hosting providers a IT Clouds are encouraging consumers and businesses to move everything they do, all their data, on the Cloud. However, does it really worth? The question actually is “What kind of Cloud services do we use?”.

Website Hosting & Email

Cloud computing is about services like: a) scalability of computing resources; b) high availability; c) failover. Cloud is not about paying for computer resource on per hour basis. So any services sold as “Cloud” would feature at least one those 3 above. Cloud computing is much more than those three, that’s for sure. It would be about operating in virtualized environment, for example. However, from SMBs point of viiew, any IT hosting service must feature high uptime and good support. That’s it.

The more computing resources any organization needs the more expensive its “Cloud” bill would be. So, any Cloud hosting services worths to be used, but it is not must. On many occasions a hardware redundant physical dedicated server would work much better, especially if a company needs a lot of storage.

Office Data & Business Applications

Moving the office operations on the Cloud is something that might worth. If we decide to optimize our office IT infrastructure, we’d realize that each and every computer is redundant on storage in term of quantity, but at the same time it is not well protected. Desktop storage does not even work in RAID 1 and most of us have 1 HDD or SDD, which would fail anytime. These things happen.

In order to deploy quality desktops, we’d spend a lot. At the same time a Virtual Desktop / Cloud Desktop (Desktop hosted remotely in any data center) would prove to be a very reasonable expense. Personal computers depreciate fast. It is very likely that a Cloud Desktop, used as a monthly service, would cost less on 36 or enve 48 month basis, compared to a quality desktop purchase. So it is a good idea to make some calculations before decide what kind of desktop or a PC to buy.

Storage

Cloud storage is expensive, especially the Cloud storage used for business. There are many companies that offer “Unlimited” personal storage, but you’d not allow yourself to get caught on this, would you? Traditional computing still works much better when it comes to storage. One could get good quality enterprise hard drives at low cost and use office NAS hardware to keep the data locally. A 16 TB, 4 HDD bays storage solution by Western Digital for example costs less than $1,000 on the market. Similar solution, purchased as monthly service on the Cloud would cost 20 – 30 times more within 5 year period.

So when it comes to storage, I would suggest anyone to: (a) Buy storage device and colocate it with any web host; or (b) To purchase a a storage device and to keep it inside the office. You can never be too careful when it come to preventing a data loss, so I’d suggest one to do both – to buy any storage solution and to use any kind of Cloud storage for the most business-critical data.

About the Author

Dimitar A.
Dimitar is founder of the global Cloud & Infrastructure Hosting provider HostColor.com & European Cloud IaaS company RAX. He has two Decades-long experience in the web hosting industry and in building and managing Cloud computing infrastructure and IT ecosystems. Dimitar is also political scientist who has published books "The New American State" and "The New Polity". "The New American State" is one of the best current political books. It is focused on the change of the American political process. It offers a perspective on how the fourth industrial revolution, also called the Digital Revolution and Industry 4.0, marks the beginning of an era of deterritorialization.

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