On Prem Vs Cloud

Fringe

Fringe

Fringe

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Morning Peeps ,

Recently Started working for a Small Company of around 100 People but only 64 Users are working on devices. Everything in our Business is currently on prem . With there only been so little user base is there any point of being Cloud based ?

Thanks
 
Fringe said:
Morning Peeps ,

Recently Started working for a Small Company of around 100 People but only 64 Users are working on devices. Everything in our Business is currently on prem . With there only been so little user base is there any point of being Cloud based ?

Thanks
Click to expand...
This is a very subjective question depending on a multitude of things such as:
  • What are your main files and applications e.g. AutoCad, Word, Excel, PDF, images
  • What are the main systems in use e.g. Windows, macOS, Linux etc
  • What is your current system/s e.g. Windows Server, some *Nix custom OS, various Linux distros etc
  • What are your requirements from your existing and new system.
Generally speaking, I would argue that most small business'/SMEs work better when they are fully cloud as if they use something like Microsoft 365 with the Business Premium license then for £16-£18 pupm they get the following (All hosted):
  • Email (Exchange Online)
  • Device management (Intune)
  • Email security (Defender for Office 365)
  • Endpoint security (Defender for Business)
  • File storage (SharePoint/OneDrive)
  • Authentication/SSO (Entra/AzureAD)
It's a decent chunk of money per user per month but when you look that it reduces the amount of stuff on site that needs maintenance, support contracts etc it works out quite well and it keeps it all in one set of portals (However many times they may change)

That being said, it's not for everyone, the above works well if they are a "Standard" business that mainly uses Office series apps etc. If they were a CAD or graphics heavy company I would argue that retaining some on premises storage would be a good idea since those files tend not to play nicely with the likes of SharePoint etc. Likewise if they were based in a part of the country where internet offering is ADSL etc then retaining on-premises file storage would also make sense.

There's also other scenarios such as macOS centric environments which whilst they might work in the cloud you may need to use other cloud solutions such as Jamf to achieve what you want.

In short, there isn't a "one size fits all answer", it's something that will need looking into carefully, considering all options that are available such as hybrid approaches, different providers etc :)

Edit: I should also add that "cloud" can be all sorts of things from SaaS solutions such as Microsoft 365 & G-Suite to PaaS and IaaS solutions such as Microsoft Azure & AWS. Some organisations "lift and shift" a lot of their traditionally configured on-premises resources such as SQL instances, virtual machines, basic file storage etc to solutions such as Azure, AWS and G-Cloud. Again, there isn't a right and wrong answer but what I would say is that just moving IaaS/PaaS to the cloud can cost more money in the long run if it isn't planned and costed properly as the benefits really come in when you leverage SaaS and look to get away from the "box standard VM" aproach
 
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  • What are your main files and applications - Office 365 Full Package , we do use some bespoke software that requires a USB Dongle to use at all times , But this is CAD design stuff
  • What are the main systems in use Windows with one Linux Machine
  • What is your current system/s e.g. Windows Server 2019 Currently
  • What are your requirements from your existing and new system. - We need to be more secure , Make sure was have cold storage and so on for the next 30 years due to a Government Contract.
Sorry for been Vague about things i have been in 2 weeks and been given this as a Project. For me i have always been on Cloud with all my previous companies this is my first on prem in a hell of a long time.

So for me i would like to push cloud but cant seem to figure out how they will use the Dongle side of this CAD application they use.

On another Note they seem to use UltraVNC from home to log Direct in to there machine and and access there dongles for the CAD side. There has to be a better way Surely lol
 
Fringe said:
  • What are your main files and applications - Office 365 Full Package , we do use some bespoke software that requires a USB Dongle to use at all times , But this is CAD design stuff
  • What are the main systems in use Windows with one Linux Machine
  • What is your current system/s e.g. Windows Server 2019 Currently
  • What are your requirements from your existing and new system. - We need to be more secure , Make sure was have cold storage and so on for the next 30 years due to a Government Contract.
Sorry for been Vague about things i have been in 2 weeks and been given this as a Project. For me i have always been on Cloud with all my previous companies this is my first on prem in a hell of a long time.

So for me i would like to push cloud but cant seem to figure out how they will use the Dongle side of this CAD application they use.

On another Note they seem to use UltraVNC from home to log Direct in to there machine and and access there dongles for the CAD side. There has to be a better way Surely lol
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So, if there is CAD in use there will likely need to be some form of on-premises storage as CAD files are not going to place nicely with SharePoint and will likely fair even worse with something like an Azure blob SMB share due to the latency and internet speed.

I would be looking at what their existing estate is, if there is ADDS and Exchange in place and then setting up a "hybrid" with Exchange Online and Entra to offload things such as email and general file storage to those platforms.

That way you can keep the big files on prem and offload the rest to SharePoint and OneDrive.

For the UltraVNC, it sounds like they are remoting onto their workstations from home, AVD might work however you may be paying a premium for a GPU heavy VM for the users so it may be best to keep this on-prem and for users who need to work maybe look at providing "beefier" laptops that can run CAD.

With the CAD and hardware side for it, I will be the first to say it's not my point of expertise so you will want to speak with the users and see what it is they require before messing with something that works already. :)
 
Fringe said:
On another Note they seem to use UltraVNC from home to log Direct in to there machine and and access there dongles for the CAD side. There has to be a better way Surely lol
Click to expand...
How are they using VNC? Hopefully it's via a VPN.

Fringe said:
For me i have always been on Cloud with all my previous companies this is my first on prem in a hell of a long time.

So for me i would like to push cloud but cant seem to figure out how they will use the Dongle side of this CAD application they use.
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Don't push cloud just because it's what you know and what you want.

Justify the benefit it brings to the business i.e. it will save £X over Y years, or it will allow everyone to collaborate better (e.g. moving to online multi-user spreadsheets), or it is more reliable than the on-prem exchange that is on it's last legs.


Not everything needs to be cloud based.
 
Armageus said:
How are they using VNC? Hopefully it's via a VPN.


Don't push cloud just because it's what you know and what you want.

Justify the benefit it brings to the business i.e. it will save £X over Y years, or it will allow everyone to collaborate better (e.g. moving to online multi-user spreadsheets), or it is more reliable than the on-prem exchange that is on it's last legs.


Not everything needs to be cloud based.
Click to expand...

I get where you are coming from i think a Hybrid will work best then.

Thanks for the help
 
The question is: What problem are you trying to solve?
Sounds like yours is a data retention one: all your existing kit is working well for the work you're doing.
But you might find that investigating something like AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive and storing all the data (once completed, or maybe at monthly checkpoints, whatever) in there. The last time I checked, you'd pay $1 per month per TiB stored. There are anciliary fees for putting the data there, and fairly substantial costs if you want to read the data - this is absolutely not Dropbox! But for storing a copy of the data, that might do.

Equally, you can investigate solutions like backing up to tapes, and storing them somewhere (safe deposit box at the bank? A company like Iron Mountain?).


As for the remote access, making sure you've got a secure VPN solution for those employees working from home is critical. Forwarding the ports for VNC at your router is not the answer; definitely check / review what the setup is here too. Given you're only two weeks in, take the time to gather the information needed rather than being in a rush to give an answer which might turn out to be wrong. The beauty of a lot of cloud stuff is that you pay for only what you use; so if all you're planning to do is frisbee 2 terabytes of stuff into S3 and ensure the company pays the monthly bills to keep it there for the duration of their contractual obligations, that's probably a palatable starting point for a boss who's paid a load of money out for their on-prem kit.
 
if your not carefull you can rack up unexpected costs, but it does depend what your doing and how.

there are autocad document managmeent systems - autocad construction cloud
it would allow for some sharing and less onprem storage.
backups handled by autodesk as well.
theres Pros & Cons to both setups.

@blueacid - on last comment thought. people should also assess the cost of moving out of the cloud if its not working out for them long term. theres usually a cost for data going out of the cloud.
 
Fringe said:
With there only been so little user base is there any point of being Cloud based ?
Click to expand...

I'm retired so my technical knowledge is well out of date so let me raise some semi-technical issues:

How sensitive is the data? It is a commonplace (true or not) that the major cloud providers have been hacked or coerced by China and / or the USA.

Do consider redundancy. The cloud is just another person's computer. So if that computer fails - datacentres do burn down - you need a plan. If the connection to that computer fails you need a plan. Typically you will have a duplicate in a geographically distant datacentre, but that will cost money. And, more locally, consider resilience: what if a workman with a digger cuts your connection to the internet?
 
Quartz said:
I'm retired so my technical knowledge is well out of date so let me raise some semi-technical issues:

How sensitive is the data? It is a commonplace (true or not) that the major cloud providers have been hacked or coerced by China and / or the USA.

Do consider redundancy. The cloud is just another person's computer. So if that computer fails - datacentres do burn down - you need a plan. If the connection to that computer fails you need a plan. Typically you will have a duplicate in a geographically distant datacentre, but that will cost money. And, more locally, consider resilience: what if a workman with a digger cuts your connection to the internet?
Click to expand...
You Couldn't have summed this up more for us and we are going to work Hybrid where we can. this works for the company and us.

The only thing we need to now find is Cold storage for 30 years but looking in to using Azure for this unless anyone can recommend any company that is competitive

thanks
 
ow i should leave this here as well : https://basecamp.com/cloud-exit
because i thought about it with a reddit post. not sure who read it but its kinda relavent.

Fringe said:
The only thing we need to now find is Cold storage for 30 years but looking in to using Azure for this unless anyone can recommend any company that is competitive
Click to expand...
tape backups and Iron Mountain considered?
 
to be fair, tape back up is slow but faster than doing a restore from cloud often in any bulk.

ow just remembered you can do sync to comvault, we used them to do a large data restore at one point.

obviously 30years is a long long time in technology, so theres a few differant things to consider with that, im sure you have!
ability to restore the data long term - may need a specialist and the vendor to help with this. - making sure to have multiple copies of the important data - LTO standards change and some times data needs to go to speciallist to recover data.
ability to open the data.. - given file formats can change quiet quickly also.
depending if the data is numeric modelling type data, the program your using may give you compeltley dfferant results or the older version not support. or ms word docs beng flagged as dangerous or no longer supported (it can happen!) (autocad version support also)

Backblaze potentially but i havent personally used them.
and obviously amazon.
 
I would put your SSO and anything else windows server related in Azure (email/SharePoint/AD/etc)

Get a decent NAS on prem to manage backups for the laptops and some local file
storage.

What CAD software is it? If it's old Autodesk you might save some money and gain a lot of cool features moving to one of there newer offerings. We had CAD guys for years rebelling against moving to Fusion360. After 1 week of using it they would never go back - the speed of their conversion was in our project plan as 6 months - we had them all over voluntarily in 3 weeks after they saw it in action with the head engineer evangelising it.
 
BongoHunter said:
I would put your SSO and anything else windows server related in Azure (email/SharePoint/AD/etc)

Get a decent NAS on prem to manage backups for the laptops and some local file
storage.

What CAD software is it? If it's old Autodesk you might save some money and gain a lot of cool features moving to one of there newer offerings. We had CAD guys for years rebelling against moving to Fusion360. After 1 week of using it they would never go back - the speed of their conversion was in our project plan as 6 months - we had them all over voluntarily in 3 weeks after they saw it in action with the head engineer evangelising it.
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The Cad software has been Designed for the company use but can only operate with a Dongle connected to the users desktop , we are waiting for the company that did it to give us a better way to use it weather its Licenced on the Server.

i did bring up the NAS but its just more things for us to look after.
 
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