Can your company go to the cloud for all their server needs? Or could you go hybrid? Just what is a hybrid setup?
The issue with onsite servers is that they all need to be ‘watered and fed’. They generally need to be replaced every 3 years or so for reliability reasons, and they also need patching – sometimes urgent patching if there’s a major security issue. They need to be kept cool, and they need licenses. Onsite servers are needy and expensive beasts.
That’s not to say servers hosted offsite do not need licenses, or patching, or replacement, but depending on what options you take, this may be taken out of your hands.
With disaster recovery (DR) and Business Continuity (BC) on everyone’s minds, there is a huge amount of work going on moving servers from being onsite to the cloud, whether that’s Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, on your own server in someone else’s data centre, or on someone else’s server in someone else’s data centre. There are lots of options here, all with their own pros and cons.
After earthquakes and COVID lockdowns, many companies are looking to make be certain that their services are always available, as well as doing what they can to make it easy or easier for their users to access services provided by those servers.
Some if not most companies are going to a hybrid solution, where they have a mix of servers onsite and some in the cloud. This can be a good option for speed and also reducing some costs, while giving some benefits of having the cloud to fall back on if needed.
We would also review your current onsite/cloud server setup to check things like:
- Age of hardware
- Licensing
- Monitoring
- Operating systems – support levels
- Patching levels and process
- Physical security
- Resourcing
- Virtual server utilisation
It’s quite possible your onsite servers are completely fine and need no changes. But wouldn’t it be nice to have that peace of mind that this has been independently checked?
You can also check out our case study here.