Rent a Cloud or Buy a Cloud. How About Both?
The Cloud has changed the way we do business. It can reduce cost, simplify asset management and offers greater flexibility through remote access – anytime, anywhere. But the question comes up, should you rent a third party cloud service, or design a cloud solution under your own roof? For a small or medium size business, there are drawbacks to only using a cloud third party service. Monthly fees can overtake the purchase price, latency can prevent access to data at crucial times, and data stored on someone else’s hardware can be compromised.
Today there are cloud solutions that work with on-premise hardware, giving you the flexibility of cloud-based anywhere access, and the security and control of managing the hardware yourself. Renting infrastructure from a public cloud service provider can seem attractive to a business with a small budget and an even smaller IT staff. However, a best practice is to balance the risks by protecting critical data from hacking and data loss through in-house solutions that provide cloud access functionality, and using a third party cloud service for less critical data.