There's no one-size-fits-all answer. Choosing between cloud and on-premise depends on context, costs, and business goals. We've seen companies that migrated everything to the cloud and regretted it, and companies that stayed on-premise and lost agility. The truth is somewhere in between.

Cloud advantages

The cloud has revolutionized how companies consume IT infrastructure. The main advantages:

• Elastic scalability — you can scale resources up or down in minutes, not weeks
• No CAPEX — no hardware investment. You pay monthly for what you use (OPEX)
• Global redundancy — major providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) offer geographically distributed availability zones
• Managed services — databases, load balancers, AI/ML, all as a service
• Deployment speed — from idea to production in hours, not months

On-premise advantages

On the other hand, on-premise isn't dead. It has clear advantages in certain scenarios:

• Total control — the hardware is yours, the data stays with you, no dependency on an external provider
• Predictable long-term cost — after the initial investment, monthly costs are significantly lower
• Minimal latency — for workloads requiring ultra-fast data access (trading, video processing)
• Compliance and regulations — certain industries (healthcare, finance, government) require data to remain in controlled locations
• Dedicated performance — you don't share resources with other tenants like in public cloud

The hybrid approach: our recommendation

In our experience, the best results come from a hybrid approach. Specifically:

• Stable, predictable workloads — on-premise (primary databases, core applications)
• Variable workloads — cloud (dev/test, burst capacity, temporary projects)
• Disaster recovery — cloud as a secondary DR site (cheaper than a second data center)
• Managed services — cloud (AI/ML, analytics, CDN)

Key questions to ask

Before making a decision, answer these questions:

1. What's the real 3-5 year TCO? Cloud seems cheap at first, but costs grow. On-premise is expensive upfront but amortizes over time.
2. What regulations apply? GDPR, NIS2, sector-specific regulations — all influence where you can store data.
3. Do you have the right team? On-premise requires sysadmin staff. Cloud requires cloud engineering skills.
4. How much flexibility do you need? If workloads vary dramatically, cloud is hard to beat.
5. What's the exit strategy? Vendor lock-in is real. How easily can you migrate from one provider to another?

Don't choose cloud or on-premise based on trends or inertia. Analyze your workloads, costs, and long-term objectives. And if you need a second opinion, get in touch.