Technology

There is no one answer that fits all. Where cloud will always be cheaper is data storage.

If you were to host everything on-prem, that would be a lot of capex. It would cost to maintain that as well. For on-prem, you have to think more about electricity, redundancy, backups, security, and so on. Anything you would need to do to build out a data center. Once you have it set up though, yes it would be cheaper.

For tech companies, this is already a non starter as they want to scale and scale fast. They also can't just spend all their investors money, so they convert capex into opex instead.

Also, historically, IT is slow. Very slow. This is why there is a world of DevOps because developers became increasingly frustrated with how slow it is to provision infrastructure for them. To fix this, you could probably hire more people, but again, that's an extra expensive that you can just now offset to cloud.

With cloud you can set up something in multiple data centers within minutes. If on-prem, you would need to have multiple physical locations of your own.

Another option is to rent out space in a data center, then you just buy your own hardware and do not have to worry about 80% of what would go into a data center. You would still need to set up these systems in a way that can scale for future use, which means more capex up front.

At the end of the day, there is no one size fits all. As you mentioned, most businesses could benefit in the long run by hosting their own stuff. I will say though, managing things like your own email server has become a nightmare. This is just a lot easier to let someone else manage. Then again, you have the concern of data storage, this is just easier and cheaper to host in cloud. Something like Google workspace or m365.

To put it another way, go to your boss and tell him you need to pay $2,000,000 up front for IT hardware. Now tell him you'll need to pay $250,000 a year for the same services in cloud. What do you think they will go with?

I do hate that it's come to this though, because I feel like people are losing knowledge. Only the people that build data centers these days will have that IT knowledge and you have people that can no longer tinker like we used to.

If you're thinking about cloud hosting, read up about how google accidentally deleted the whole of australias pension funds account and maybe think twice about if you can afford to lose everything you have in the cloud.

Of course, stuff like that doesn't happen everyday or to everyone. But will knowing that you've just been fucked by random chance help you when it happens?

If you can, do selfhosting. If you can't, at least have backups somewhere other than the cloud, because the cloud is nothing more than someone else's computer. And if it's someone else's computer, the weakest link in the chain of security is always a human, who may or may not be an idiot or who may have a bad day.

That's a broad topic where I would avoid making generalizations. It's a matter of tradeoffs.

The key indicators I'd look at are, in no particular order:

• Cost. Does cloud hosting provide economies of scale that dramatically reduce operational costs?
• Risk. If your cloud provider hikes prices or turns out to be based in a hostile fascist dictatorship, can you easily switch to another offering?
• Liability. For better and more often for worse, companies love delegating business because it relieves them of liability if someone cocks it up. It's a harsh reality that some SMEs have IT infrastructure that looks fine and inexpensive until they find out the hard way that their "IT person" doesn't know what a firewall is.
• Accounting. Companies strongly prefer OpEx to CapEx due to the way modern accounting incentives, and cloud hosting is tailored to that.
• Practicality. If you want your email to sync to your phone abroad, you'll need a cloud (though it could be a private cloud, but then I'd recommend a VPN which is more secure but less practical).
• Security. Does the NSA looking at all your files matter? For governments I would hope it does buuuuut...

Either way it goes, be mindful of blind spots. Companies often don't (IMO) properly assess the risk of locking themselves into walled gardens due to short-termism. But at the same time IT gremlins such as myself tend to underestimate the costs we represent, not just as salaried employees but as people who might cock something up or leave behind us an undocumented mess that will costs hundreds of thousands to rebuild a few years from now.

In my org email went to shit after they outsourced it and lost the institutional knowledge. Now we suddenly have random things happen, like a second layer of quarantine appearing, and nobody can explain it. Any support request is copy pasted forward and backward to the outsourcing provider. If the outsourcing provider's response makes no sense it's forwarded to you internally none the less, and without comment.

My colleagues tell me that back in the nineties we were running an X.400 email gateway in this very company before it was clear that Internet email would be the one to win the protocol wars. We were at the forefront of email developments then.

And we're still a god damn tech company. We're a registry (not registrar), network provider, security services provider, cloud provider, etc. But email is now apparently too hard for us, it's a sad state of affairs.

Cloud hosting is not the answer for everyone.

It was a meme sold to the public by people richer than us so we give up even more control while opening another lifeline to our wallets.

Sure, the cloud is a cancer on computing. It may make some sense for large corporations but for small and medium business it takes away their agency. IT staff should be developed and in house coding should be the norm.

Allowing cloud and AI to run everything is a recipe for disaster.

It definitely is not for everyone.