The cloud industry spent two decades saying everything belongs in the cloud, and it was selling something. The server industry said the opposite, also selling something. The truth is workload by workload, and plenty of businesses land on both at once. Here's the framework we use, including the cases where we tell clients to keep the closet.
The cases where the closet server wins
- Steady, predictable load. Cloud pricing shines when demand varies; you rent capacity as needed. A server that does the same file-and-app duty every day for years is the case cloud pricing likes least. Paid-off hardware doing boring work is cheap.
- Big files, local people. A design shop pushing giant video or CAD files around the office gets gigabit speed from a local box. The same workflow through the cloud fights your internet connection all day and often loses.
- Software that can't leave. Some line-of-business and machine-control apps are licensed or built for local hardware, and rehosting them is more surgery than it's worth. See what rehosting involves before assuming.
- Thin internet. Cloud-everything assumes a fat, reliable connection. If your area offers neither, the cloud is a rumor. At minimum, fix failover first.
The cases where the cloud wins
- The hardware cliff. Your server is five-plus years old and replacement means $10,000 to $20,000 up front for gear you'll ride another five years. That cliff is the natural decision point, and cloud turns it into a monthly bill.
- Remote and multi-site teams. If half the company isn't in the building, the building is a bad place for the data. VPNs into an office server are the duct tape holding up a decision that's already been made.
- Spiky or growing load. Seasonal businesses and fast growers pay for peak capacity year-round on-prem. Cloud follows the curve.
- Recovery, quietly the biggest one. A cloud-first business has no server to resurrect after a flood or theft: recovery collapses into laptops plus logins. Compare the tiers in disaster recovery vs backup and notice how much of the cost exists to protect a physical box.
The score that isn't a tie: hybrid
Most 10-to-100-person businesses land mixed: email and files in Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, the odd local app on a small on-prem box or a NAS, maybe virtualized to make eventual moves easier. This isn't indecision; it's the right architecture for having both kinds of workload, which most businesses do.
How to actually decide
Per workload, three questions. What does this cost over five years in each home, honestly, including the migration cost and the egress line? Who needs to reach it, from where? What happens to it on the day the building or the hardware fails? Write the answers down for each system, and the migration list mostly writes itself. Then check it against the readiness checklist before anything moves.
Want this handled instead of homeworked? That's the job.
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