The answer to this question is “it depends” and may not be as simple as it may appear. There are a number of considerations such as size of your company in terms of number of users, application requirements, Internet connectivity and total cost of ownership over a period of time such as 36 months. For some service such as off-site backup of company data it is easy decision. We suggest clients backup data to the cloud as well as keep a local copy on the server for disaster recovery purposes. But for application hosting on the cloud we suggest that a thorough analysis be done that takes into account cost of hardware, expected life of hardware, licensing, cloud provider cost and supportability. Just as an example there may be HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) record (ePHI or electronic Patient Health Record) retention requirement for which we have to consider storage options for In-House vs Cloud. Certain clients it is cheaper to buy a server or built a cluster of servers, whereas for others it may be offer a better return on investment to push applications to the cloud. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We have been advising clients across various business sectors to make an informed decision.
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