Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

Forget the bank for a moment, and imagine if you were in direct competition with Amazon and concerned about insider risks.

Now imagine you're aware that Amazon's retail arm is quite happy to launch competing products based on sales data from marketplace sellers, so it's not like they have strict firewalls protecting competitors who pay Amazon for services.

Now imagine Amazon offers you a bunch of security options that sound suspiciously like snake-oil. Like an encrypted storage service where they store the encryption key and transparently decrypt files when you request them.

Now imagine you know people with hypervisor access can do what they like to your VM and leave no evidence whatsoever. And your on-prem experience is that there will definitely be some people with hypervisor access.

Now imagine you've been through various audit and certification processes yourself, and you don't find yourself reassured by the knowledge Amazon has too.

Now imagine if you were a boss at AWS and you found an insider had violated policies and accessed things they shouldn't have. Would it be better for your career to publicise that widely, or reprimand the guy then hush things up?

Now imagine you've been an ambitious cowboy at certain times in your career, and although you've never accessed a competitor's data to give an edge to something you were working on, you can see how it would be a temptation.

I can understand how a person who believed all that would believe putting their business in their competitors hands would be a naive decision.

didn't they EOL omnipath last year?

A company which:

1. Does "security" critical stuff (like affecting the security of people not data if breached)

2. Which besides certain kinds of breaches has lowish requirements to performance and reliability (short outages of a view minutes are not a big problems, even outages of half a day or so can be coped with)

3. Slightly paranoid founders, with a good amount of mistrust into any cloud company.

4. Founders and tech-lead which have experience in some areas but toughly underestimate the (time)cost of managing servers them self, and that _kinda_ hard to do secure by yourself (wrt. long term DDOS and similar).

So was it a good reason? Probably not. But we still went with it.

As a site note while we did not use the could _we didn't physically manage server either_. Instead we had some dedicated hardware in some compute center in Germany which they did trust. So no "physical" managements securing etc. needed and some DDOS and network protection by default. Still we probably could have it easier without losing anything.

On the other side if you have a dedicated server hardware in some trusted "localish" compute center it's not _that_ bad either to manage.

Yes. Why? Cost, availability, flexibility, bandwidth. For a lot of companies, on-prem servers are the best solution for efficiency and cost.

One great example. We were paying $45k/yr for a hosted MS Dynamics GP solution. For $26k we brought it in house with only a $4k/yr maintenance fee. We bought a rackmount Dell, put on VMWare, have an app VM and a DB VM. My team can handle basic maintenance. In the past 11 months we haven't had to touch that server once. We have an automated backup, pulls VMs out daily and sends them off to Backblaze. Even if we need to call our GP partner for some specialized problem, it's not $45k/yr in consulting costs.

We had a bunch of Azure servers for Active Directory and a few other things. When I came in 2 years ago I set up new on-prem DC VMs, and killed out absurd Azure monthly bill, we were saving money by month three. A meteor could take out Atlanta and the DCs are our satellite offices would handle the load just fine until we restored from backups and we'd STILL save money. We've had MORE uptime and reliability since then too.

If I have a server go down, we have staff to get on it immediately, no toll free number to dial, no web chat to a level 1 person in India, etc.

Our EMR is hosted, because that's big enough that I want to pay someone to be in control over it, and someone to blame. However, there have been many times where I'm frustrated with how they handle problems, and jumping from one EMR to another is not easy. And in the end they're all bad anyway. Sometimes I DO wish we were self hosted.

The Cloud is just someone else's computer. If they're running those machines more cheaply than you are, they're cutting out some cost. The question is, do you need what they're cutting?

I interned at LLNL on three separate occasions during school. Everything about what y'all do in high-performance computing is levels beyond anything I've gone on to see in the "real world". I cannot drop enough praise.