Most of what is written about Information Technology is geared to medium-to-large business. Included in that is what has been written about cloud repatriation. But, even this seemingly-esoteric term has relevance to small businesses.
Cloud repatriation simply means the moving of your company’s data and workloads (applications) away from the public cloud (other people’s servers), and either on to private clouds (which can mean various things), or on to your own equipment, either on your premises or in a colocation facility.
The reasons for doing so are the same for a small business as they are for enterprise organizations:
- Cost
- Performance
- Reliability
Let’s look at each of these.
First, cost. Can it really be cheaper to host your data and applications in-house? Absolutely, if you look at the big picture and do the math. The best way to do this is to do a five-year IT plan, which analyses all the costs involved. What may look like an attractively-modest monthly rate with minimal up-front expenses for cloud services can turn into a pretty expensive prospect over five years. The purchase of servers and network infrastructure may seem daunting, but can be a wise investment, as it is pretty typical for the five-year cost to be 50% or less than the total price of the public cloud option, even after including managed IT services.
Secondly, performance. While it is possible to purchase and easily (relatively) scale any level of performance in the cloud, typically, it is cost-prohibitive to purchase the equivalent performance of an in-house server. In addition to the cloud-side performance bottleneck, you have the problem of being connected to your data and applications via an internet connection. Even the fastest fiber connection is going to introduce bandwidth and latency limitations that would not be present when connecting to a server on your office network.
Finally, reliability. While cloud services tend to be fairly reliable, their reliability is out of your hands. Any maintenance windows are determined by the provider, not in consultation with your or consideration of your business needs. For a local server, you can determine when maintenance is done so as to minimize business interruptions. And if your internet connection goes down for any reason, you are suddenly unable to operate normally until the problem is resolved. The recent storms in the Portland area should be food for thought in that regard. Some businesses in Clackamas County have had no internet for a month.
If all this makes you wonder how your business can best navigate the cloud repatriation question, give us a call at Gorge Tech Services, and we can help you with a five-year IT plan!