Onsite or outsourced? That is the question. The cloud has made moving large amounts of data easy and manageable, increasing the ability to back up such important information. The cloud easily allows a business to reduce costs, save space and share resources. Even big businesses prefer outsourcing their IT needs rather than maintaining them onsite. But what does this mean for the dedicated server marketplace? Are there good reasons for a small business to keep an on-premises or colo site How do you know where to spend your IT dollars? Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of maintaining your IT onsite versus outsourcing it.
More control vs more responsibility
If your servers are located onsite, you do have unprecedented control over hardware, installations, application setting, and configurations. But that control comes with the added cost and time constraints associated with managing and maintaining your data center environment. In a cloud environment, you can opt to have some say in applications, but the hardware and software installations will be chosen and managed by your selected cloud provider. What you may give up in control could be more than replaced in convenience and savings.
Prohibitive costs
Owning and maintaining your own server farm can be costly, especially when you factor in the price of hardware, the necessary backup hardware to create redundancy, as well as maintenance and monitoring expenses both in software and staffing. There are also costs associated with providing an appropriate environment that encompasses proper power supply and cooling and physical security. The list can go on and on. In a cloud-based environment, you are only paying for what you are using currently. All other costs are handled by the vendor.
The question of security
When it comes to cloud environments, the biggest concern for most IT managers is security. Migrating to the cloud means letting go of physical servers. To be fair, it’s easy to question security that’s held and provided by someone else, and it’s true that you’ll have less access and “eyes” on the equipment. The good news is that cloud providers take security very seriously, as their business absolutely depends on it. In fact, most companies would find it hard to compete with the security standards, expert staffing, and budget of a large cloud provider.
Outsourcing your IT infrastructure may sound like a scary prospect, but in reality, it represents one of the smartest moves a company can make. The demand for cloud-based services has never been greater and with good reason. Used correctly, cloud-based systems offer a number of advantages over older methodologies of data storage and security.
