Some businesses find it preferable to host their servers on-site, but they fail to ask themselves if the server is a reliable asset or a financial drain. For years, the argument was in favor of on-premise hardware due to control and a one-time purchase price. But the landscape has shifted since, and now business owners are prioritizing Total Cost of Ownership over control. Do you really know how much your physical servers are costing you, and do you think they are worth that price point?
Today, we’re helping you face reality with a head-to-head financial breakdown of on-premise infrastructure versus the scalability of the cloud.
Consider the Invisible Utilities and Real Estate Costs
When you buy a server, the initial price tag is just the tip of the iceberg.
Servers are high-performance machines that need a specific environment to survive and thrive. Since servers generate massive amounts of heat, they need a climate-controlled room that can add hundreds of dollars to your monthly utility bill. That climate-controlled room also needs to be a space dedicated to hosting that server, so you’ll need server racks or cabinets specifically designed to store these machines. And to top it all off, you need to keep this room safe from disasters and unauthorized entry.
So no, an unlocked, unventilated closet is not going to cut it for your server-management needs, and the dedicated space described above is going to cost you.
Compare Your Capital Spikes to Predictable Scalability
When you invest in on-premise infrastructure, what you’re really doing is forcing your business into a cycle of over-buying.
Simply put, hardware isn’t flexible, and the same hardware you buy today isn’t going to be powerful enough to run your business in five years. If you are purchasing technology that you’ll need in the next five years, however, you’re essentially overpaying for capacity that you don’t need right now. Instead of staying trapped in this cycle, you can invest in pay-as-you-grow Software-as-a-Service and cloud models that transform capital expenses into predictable monthly payments, allowing for easy scaling according to your specific needs.
Since your cloud vendor handles hardware updates, security patches, and parts replacements, your team benefits from not having to worry about the additional costs of upkeep often associated with on-premise infrastructure.
Factor in the Cost of Redundancy and Business Continuity
To achieve cloud-level reliability with on-premise hardware, your business will have to buy everything twice—first to build the infrastructure, then again for your second failover server.
This level of redundancy is much easier to accomplish with the cloud, as redundancy is built right in. Cloud providers store data across multiple geographically diverse data centers, which means your business will always have a copy to rely on in times of need. Furthermore, the cloud provider takes care of backup and disaster recovery so your company doesn’t have to.
It also helps that large cloud providers have near-limitless budgets for investing in security protocols that your small business can never replicate on its own, so why work harder than you need to when you can simply work with a cloud provider?
The total cost of ownership is more than just hardware. It also includes the time, energy, and risk associated with managing that hardware. While buying and implementing a server might feel like ownership, the cloud gives you the freedom to focus on your business instead of worrying about your server room. GeekBox IT can help you achieve this goal through our managed services. To learn more, call us today at (336) 790-1000.