For any small, medium or large business, this is a conversation that is common among decision makers at different stages of their business life cycles. In order to come to a final decision that will allow said decision makers to sleep well at night, it is important to consider a few key factors. These factors help to clearly define the needs of the organization and how best to cater to these needs cost-effectively. While most organizations consider the usual factors such as cost, security risks and organizational needs such as file sharing or hosting applications, other important factors tend to be left out of the conversation.
For example, decision-makers may forget to consider the importance of your employees having easy access at any time or location without VPN restrictions. This is especially vital to those with virtual or remote employees and stakeholders. Others may prioritize compliance above their need for uptime during business transactions which are true for organizations dealing with medical data, government or financial institutions. A comprehensive business continuity plan will prompt a wise decision maker to consider the future needs of the organization. Growth potential and changing demands require additional investment to mitigate and can be avoided by opting for a cloud service provider. Cloud-based servers offer flexibility and scalability that allow the service providers to adjust memory, storage or computing power according to current needs with a click of a button as compared to in-house servers that may take days or weeks.
Cons of cloud-based servers
- Service outages; occur often and if your data is not backed up or stored, access to it will be lost. We rule this out by having three data centers in different geographical locations, including a local one such that if the local server fails, all traffic is redirected to the two remaining data centers so that no disruption is felt on our clients’ part
- Time-consuming data recovery; with the cloud, it is easy to backup data. However, the recovery of large volumes of data whether a complete loss of emails or backed up data can be time-consuming even over a fast internet connection. How do we rule out this tricky problem?
In case of a total system wipe out, they’ll only need to rebuild the server or give us another server that we can use to restore the data. If they were on our Pepea Disaster Recovery service, the process will be a matter of minutes since their users can continue working from our end for a maximum of 7days while they rebuild the servers. Once they are up, we will restore for them the server images as they were prior to the wipe out”, a direct quote from our technical team.
- Limited storage capacity; some cloud service providers may offer limited space for hosting clients’ mail or domain by having their clients share one server. We eliminate this problem by offering our clients separate mail and domain server hosting, especially for clients who utilize mass mailing or whose domains require larger storage capacities.
- Cost; if you are an organization that is not dependent on uptime or instant recovery, then the costs of cloud-based servers may outweigh the benefits. But in the case of Pepea back up and Disaster recovery where the cons are made benefits, then the cost is worth every penny, don’t you think?
In conclusion, while on-premise servers may give you total control over data, protect sensitive information and facilitate file sharing or applications hosting within the organization, cloud-based servers though on a higher price range release the pressure of maintaining, upgrading and requiring additional investment to meet new demands by having someone else do it for you. That someone else is Message Labs Africa, we are on the clock 24/7, 365 days a year to ensure smooth sailing for not only our client organizations but their end users as well. A recent innovation has however brought a far more superior solution to the table, that is, Hybrid servers, stay tuned for more insights on this.
