Information for Business from Lenovo
Charmaine Teoh
Contributor: Charmaine Teoh
Keep on-site servers or move to the cloud?

Are you thinking of moving some or all of your servers to the cloud? While there are good reasons to adopt cloud servers, there are also strong arguments for keeping physical machines on-site.

Hosting servers in the cloud has its attractions. Servers can be deployed quickly and efficiently when you need to support an urgent project. They can be scaled up and down based on the needs of the business and generally require a low initial investment.

However, businesses should consider maintaining a number of on-site servers for one major reason: to have control over the servers and the enterprise data and applications they host. Although you may have to employ staff with the skills to set up and maintain your server environment, the investment will be repaid in peace of mind for the business.

Avoid latency

Maintaining on-site servers counters some of the major issues associated with cloud servers, including latency. By accessing data and applications kept on on-site servers, users can bypass the lag that often occurs when waiting for data to travel between different routers and networks (possibly over long distances) before it reaches them.

Latency is further increased if your business does not have the bandwidth required to support the volume of data that is being sent over the network. If your internet connection can’t cope with the amount of data being transmitted, you have to increase your bandwidth requirements, which can be costly. You can buy dedicated links to the cloud servers, but this can be expensive.

Another danger of moving all your servers to the cloud is that if your internet connection goes down, you lose all access to your servers – and the data and applications you need to run your business. While on-site servers can experience the same issues if you have external-facing systems, your internal systems can still function over your network.

Protect confidential data

Organisations that deal with sensitive information such as governments and health organisations or financial services firms could be better off with on-site servers. While cloud servers on the whole are highly secure, there is always the risk of breaches whether you host in a private or public cloud. Keeping confidential data on an in-house physical server means you can implement your own security policies and act quickly if a breach occurs.

Customise your server infrastructure

When your servers are located on your premises, you can build an infrastructure that’s tailored to the needs of your business. This isn’t always possible with a hosted cloud solution, or it will be costly. You can also upgrade your server infrastructure as your company grows or changes. For example, you can easily provision virtual servers on physical machines.

There’s a wide range of servers at different price points to suit every organisation. While they require a degree of commitment from the IT team, the benefits that on-site servers provide are well worth the time and money.

The evolution of technology and expectations is finally making good on the power of the cloud to extend the reach of new ideas about communication, collaboration, and the future of work. As the cloud moves from futuristic 
to foundational, your hardware needs to be just as transformational.

Lenovo® devices powered by Intel® processors are committed to building these tools. Read about the kinds of server capabilities needed to build a solid backbone for your data.

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