Cloud vs on-premise storage: which is best for your business?

If you’ve been keeping an eye on trends in tech over the last year, you’ve probably noticed many businesses talking about moving away from the cloud.

Cloud repatriation- moving data and workloads partially or entirely away from the cloud to an in-house storage solution- has become increasingly popular over the last few years, with some companies speaking out about their decision. If your business is thinking of leaving the cloud behind, there are several factors to consider.

Cost

Renting space in the cloud has become more expensive over the years, with rising upfront prices and costly additional services such as extra storage, data management and AI. Some SMEs have reported paying over £500,000 a year for their cloud services.

Many traditional servers for storage cost much less than this and will last in a business for up to five years. Depending on the size, they’ll also be able to store much more data without costing additional fees. For example, the UK’s largest non-metropolitan police force invested in a pair of servers for £250,000, which will keep 3 petabytes of evidence secure for 20 years.

Scalability

One benefit which draws customers to the cloud is its scalability, offering the ability to upgrade your plan whenever you need more storage. It’s often claimed that physical storage cannot be upgraded without significant costs and inconvenience. Whilst this may be true of COTS servers, intelligently designed custom solutions can be flexibly scaled depending on your needs.

Vendor lock-in

Whilst subscriptions offered by cloud providers are flexible in terms of cost and scale, many businesses find themselves falling victim to vendor lock-in. Once signed up you may find it incredibly hard to switch providers, even if you’re unsatisfied, because it is very difficult to move data once it has been reformatted and set up in the cloud. You may also become dependant on that provider’s software if it has been incorporated into your business practices. This risk is mitigated when opting for on-site storage.

Security and compliance

Recurring vulnerabilities have led some businesses to wonder if their data is safe in the cloud. Security holes in some major providers could leave your company open to data losses and leakages. Cloud outages could also greatly affect your business, potentially causing the loss of data, customer trust, and ultimately revenue. In-house servers allow for increased visibility and better management of your data. They’re also generally more compatible with your compliance policies, as you can keep a much closer eye on your data.

Degraded performance

Due to the distance requests need to travel between cloud servers and a requesting device, some businesses have noticed latency issues when using the cloud. On-site storage benefits from low latency and local storage, aiding performance.

With these factors in mind, many companies are choosing to return to in-house storage. Although cloud-based solutions ease the burden of managing your own servers, they can become very expensive and lead to security and performance issues down the line.

If you’re considering leaving the cloud behind and you’re looking for a solution you can use with confidence, get in touch here!