On-premise vs cloud: which is right for your business?

There's a default answer in the industry — move everything to the cloud — and for most small and mid-sized businesses it's the right one. But not always. Understanding the trade-offs matters, because a lift-and-shift into Azure or AWS that's badly designed can end up slower, less reliable and less flexible than the old server it replaced.

When the cloud is the obvious choice

• Email, file sharing and office productivity. 365 or Google Workspace, no debate.
• Any business with staff working from more than one location.
• Any business that doesn't want to think about hardware refresh cycles.
• Anywhere disaster recovery matters — cloud is inherently multi-site.
• Growth businesses where the size of the team could double or halve in 18 months.

When on-premise still makes sense

• Line-of-business software that was written for a local server and has no cloud version worth using.
• Very high-throughput CAD, video or scientific workloads where moving the data over the internet is the bottleneck.
• Machinery and factory-floor systems that need to keep running when the internet goes down.
• Regulated data that has genuine sovereignty or residency requirements not met by the mainstream cloud providers.
• Sites with unreliable broadband and no realistic way to fix it.

The hybrid middle

Most real businesses end up somewhere in the middle. Email and files in the cloud, main line-of-business app on a local server, disaster recovery copy of the local server in Azure so a lost office isn't a lost business. That's a perfectly sensible architecture and it's what we design for most of our Lincolnshire clients.

How to decide

Ignore the marketing on both sides and answer three questions. Where does the data need to be, physically, for the business to work at speed? Who's going to look after the infrastructure, and can they do it in the cloud? What happens to the business if the office is unavailable for a week? Whichever answer minimises risk and complexity — cloud, on-prem or hybrid — is the right one for you.

We're happy to run through your setup and give you a straight answer either way. We don't have a preference between cloud and on-prem; we have a preference for whatever actually works.