A Crossroad Between Cloud And Physical Server

Being part of digital transformation is becoming a necessity to survive in today's business environment. When the decision is made and the process has started there are many technical questions to be addressed, such as deciding whether should you be using a physical or cloud server?

While both of them serve the same goal of sending, receiving, and storing data, both have their pros and cons. Which one of those to be used depends on the specific needs and wants of the business.?

However, after all these years it is getting clear to all of us that cloud solutions are the next-generation servers, superior to physical ones for a number of reasons.?

Let me tell you more about our experience.

I remember when we started our 2-men-business in 2013 and moved to our first small office. Actually, we reconstructed 3 former storage rooms without electricity, water-supply or toilets and made an office, a meeting room, and a kitchen. The second step after reconstruction was to install a server and an IT infrastructure. At this point, our IT infrastructure was massively overcoming our needs. It was made for a 10+ employee company and it was made to last a few years.

After that first install and with a high level of company growth, we changed our server infrastructure a few times and upgraded many features on a regular basis. Now, there is a high-tech server in a cooled and locked room on which more than 50 people can work. Almost everything works perfectly and we could do business as usual for many years to come.

However, with big changes in the workspace stressed by COVID-19, remote work became necessary, and having a physical server became a huge limitation. Some of them are:

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• Remote access needs more RAM capacity and upgrades.?
• Changing software solutions are forcing us to update the software in a shorter time.?
• The rise of cybercrime is a very big threat and we need a real-time back-up on a simultaneous backup server.

I could write many other reasons forcing us to pay full attention to our server and IT infrastructure, which can be quite overwhelming and time-consuming which is taking attention from our regular business.

In case you are rethinking your options here are some important pointers we have discovered when researching this topic.?

What is the Difference between Physical and Cloud?

Physical servers are bare metals, which consist of hardware such as motherboards, hard drives, processors, and so on. In simple terms, we can also call them huge computers that need an entire room for themselves. On the other hand, cloud servers are connected to virtual machines, that are run on a cloud computing environment.?

One of the downsides of the physical server is its maintenance. As it is physically located in a room, there may be some data breaches and unauthorised operation attempts. Physical servers can be vulnerable as they need to be located in a room in the workplace. For that, extreme safety measures might be needed to preserve the data. For instance, physical server rooms should not have any windows and should have only one door to enter them. This door needs to have one or ideally more than one electronic lock for full security. Sounds overwhelming, isn't it? However, these measures are necessary for the well-being of your clients' information.?

Yet there is more to talk about the security actions to be taken to prevent your physical server from outside threats. Physical servers are indeed located just inside your office.?Knowing that might give a false feeling of security since we inherently feel more in control of the physical things around us. However, your server is still unprotected against malfunctions caused by water, fire, or any human mistake. Additionally, as the computer workload starts to get larger and more complex, physical servers begin to take up more space. In the long run, it might grow to a size that your business can't afford to store.

On top of all these, moving out from the current office can easily become a nightmare with an in-house data server. Since all your valued information is inside that hardware, extreme caution needs to be followed.

Reasons to Choose Cloud Over Physical Server!

It seems like new measures are constantly coming up to secure physical servers. It is as if they are not going to end.

All these considerations are the reasons why cloud servers have become so popular. As the name implies everything with a cloud server is virtual. Virtual servers are software-based environments that copy every function of a physical server. One advantage of cloud servers is they are designed for the specific needs of a particular user. Without going too much into technicalities, this causes virtual servers to be more cost-effective. Cloud servers do not require any space, for this reason, they are a perfect match, especially for small businesses and start-ups as they are prone to grow fastly.

Furthermore, with the virtual server, you would have the opportunity to back up or access your data from anywhere with an internet connection using your computer, telephone, or tablet. This is extremely important because it is now critical to receive, reach and send the information as conveniently and fastly as possible for businesses.?

Additionally, virtual servers are more secure than physical ones. Advanced cloud technologies are especially focusing on ensuring a high level of cyber security, especially as this was in the past one of the reasons for cloud skepticism. When we take that security fear element, all what is left over are reasons to switch to the cloud now.?

Virtual servers can be managed centrally with ease. Meanwhile, physical servers need an individual system of protection for every new server established. This makes virtual servers more favorable than physical ones. All the mentioned advantages are the reasons why so many businesses have started adopting virtual environments.?The newest data shows that the share of corporate data stored in the cloud doubled since 2015. Although there has been an increase in cloud usage, the effect of COVID in the last 2 years should also be given credit.

In Conclusion

Based on the explanations above, it seems the virtual environment is advantageous in every aspect imaginable. How physical servers provide higher computing power since they have dedicated components such as CPU and storage. Further, however unlikely it may sound to occur, there may sometimes be internet connection cut-offs either from your side or the provider's side, hindering access to data in the virtual environment. On the contrary, on a physical server, you always have full accessibility to your data.

If we weigh the cons and pros we can just say that the future is cloud. This is because, at one point every business using physical servers will have to switch to virtual servers for the reasons of cost, security, manageability, and space efficiency.?From our point of view, we always give advice to our clients to make their digital bookkeeping and accounting cloud-based in order to keep flexibility, efficiency, and control costs while achieving a high level of cyber security.?

Please contact us for more info about AmbiCON services or check our page ambicon.at?