We're a small but rapidly growing business, currently transitioning from a manual workflow heavily reliant on Excel to developing our own in-house ERP system. With around 20 office employees and a plan to expand to 50 field sales staff, we're facing some pivotal decisions about our IT infrastructure. We've identified critical issues like the lack of backup, email systems, and sufficient storage—a situation we need to resolve while balancing data safety and costs. Currently, we plan to set up a system that's mostly on-premise (90%) with a small cloud segment (10%) for email and offsite backup. This approach is driven by factors like data protection laws, security concerns stemming from recent hacks, and the large volume of data we generate daily. Is this strategy the right move?
1 Answer
Your approach of 90% on-prem and 10% cloud sounds reasonable given your requirements. It's wise not to lock yourself into one solution; some businesses are moving back from full cloud setups for various reasons. You might also want to consider co-location at a local data center rather than purely on-prem. This way, you can manage sensitive data locally while benefiting from reliable connectivity and storage options.
Right now, we're doing a hybrid setup too—cloud for email and backups while keeping internal apps on-premise. It lets us leverage both benefits.