If you’ve talked to a software vendor in the past decade or so, you’ve probably heard a pretty consistent pitch for the cloud: your access will be seamless, you’ll have nothing to maintain, there’s no limit to what you can do! Unfortunately, this isn’t necessarily the case. If either your business or the cloud provider experiences an outage, for instance, all these benefits evaporate. Your business is, for all intents and purposes, closed until the problem is solved.

Enter the local database, a practical and efficient way to overcome this weakness.

When your team members are trying to hit tight deadlines, they want the path of least resistance. Often, that means saving critical files to their local desktop or a personal cloud account to avoid network latency or deep folder hierarchies.

It seems harmless on the surface. However, storing company information on local drives creates major operational risks for your business.

Some businesses find it preferable to host their servers on-site, but they fail to ask themselves if the server is a reliable asset or a financial drain. For years, the argument was in favor of on-premise hardware due to control and a one-time purchase price. But the landscape has shifted since, and now business owners are prioritizing Total Cost of Ownership over control. Do you really know how much your physical servers are costing you, and do you think they are worth that price point?

Profitability is less the measure of being able to turn a profit, and more the measure of how much profit you can make. For the successful small business, the integration of technology can dictate what kind of annual margins you are looking at. For the new company, however, it can be something even more critical: the difference between setting a course for success, or wallowing in failure. Today we analyze the cost difference between hosting your IT in-house, or choosing to host it in the cloud.