When to NOT use the cloud?

Last week I wrote about why you should be moving everything to the cloud. I'm sure there were a plethora of other articles saying the same thing along with every consultant everywhere telling you to move to their cloud offering. 

This week, I'd like to give you some scenarios where you may consider not moving to the cloud. That's right. I think there are situations where relying on internal servers, or at least co-located physical servers, makes sense.

Development environments

If you're a slightly larger company, you probably have multiple development and test environments. Repurposing old hardware for dev environments serves multiple purposes - least of all (but still a great benefit) is reducing cost. Yeah sure you can switch those EC2 instances off when the devs aren't working, but with old hardware you get the benefit of everything working at snail pace. If it works there - imagine how well it will go on that shiny new Azure mega-machine.

Legacy software

Let's talk that old VB6 app that you will be retiring in 2 years time when that SAP project finally gets implemented. Or the Access database that needs a bit of TLC, but generally runs fine all year for the 2 people that need it. While moving them to the cloud may seem like a good idea, it's not what most cloud services were designed for. These are stable, predictable apps that have a limited lifespan. Get a low-cost or second hand server and run these apps locally. Backup to the cloud. Have some level of redundancy, but focus your efforts on moving onto the future state of the platform.

You need low latency

There are really specific examples where having 10 gigabit connectivity to your primary data crunching server is handy. Think of environments where super-large chunks of data are processed regularly. Maybe in predictive business intelligence, or actuarial computing. Or high intensity graphics, video or audio. In these cases, don't compromise. Have offsite data storage to suit.

You are a technology company

What self-respecting IT company would be worth it's bitcoins without a bunch of servers laying around in half-constructed racks? No seriously though - I'm not talking about Joe's Computers at the local shopping centre, I'm talking about companies that live to serve data and to provide these services. They have the shared expertise to manage data centers and/or PaaS offerings on behalf of small businesses. In most cases these are the guys that need control, so if anything goes wrong, they can find where, how and what it's going to take to resolve it. 

In summary, the future is the cloud. But I think there are still viable reasons to host infrastructure yourself. Just make sure that reason stacks up. If you're interested in why you should use the cloud check out my previous article discussing this.