Servers… The Dine In or Take Out Dilemma

Servers… The Dine In or Take Out Dilemma

With so many different personal tastes, allergies, portable snacks, portion control needs, crazy diets, busy schedules and “order apps” on your phone, everyone has something different on their dinner plate at the end of the day. What to make for dinner is a frequent question, and the dilemma of whether to “dine in” or “take out” is real.

To grandma’s chagrin, meals are too often not put together the old-fashioned way. People choose to order take-out for a variety of reasons...mainly time and convenience. No kitchen cleanup is needed, and that’s a BIG plus! However, sometimes by the time we get home from work, we just want to stay home and relax in our comfy clothes and enjoy a home-cooked meal.

The business person today often has a similar question to the “Dine In or Take Out” dilemma. The decision to host key business applications in-house or store them on the cloud is debatable. Here are some pros and cons to consider in evaluating that decision:

Server In-House (Prepare at Home) Server in the Cloud (Get Take Out)
Pros:

  • Complete, physical control of your hardware
  • Reduced inappropriate access to key data
  • Minimized reliance on internet access
  • Hardware dedicated solely to your business
  • Lower, long-term cost of ownership
 Pros:

  • No capital outlay for hardware
  • Easy to scale up or down
  • Pay for what you need
  • Access from anywhere
  • Ideal for mobile workforce
  • Predictable expenses
Cons:

  • Capital investment required
  • Space for the hardware needed
  • No uptime or recovery time guarantees
 Cons:

  • Data recovery costs can be very high
  • Storage and access costs
  • No internet, no business
  • Data in a shared environment
  • Loss of control of your data
  • Larger internet bandwidth needed

Unlike deciding what is for dinner and/or whether to prepare a meal at home or grab some take out, the decision about in‑house versus cloud servers does not need to be an all-or-nothing approach. Very often the answer for organizations is to move some applications to the Cloud such as email management systems and keep more unique line-of-business applications onsite. Some call this the hybrid solution. On the flip side, the hybrid solution to a take-out meal is driving a Prius to the restaurant to pick up food instead of having the restaurant deliver!

Need advice on whether or not to move your applications to the cloud? Click here to contact us for a free consultation.

First published in our June 2019 IT Radix Resource newsletter