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

>I honestly fail to see any good reason not to use the cloud anymore, at least for business. Cost-wise, security-wise, whatever-wise.

Problem is point of failure, many businesses need to be independent and having data stored in the cloud is a bad idea overall. Because it produces point of failure issues. Consider if we ever got a real nasty solar wind and the electric grid goes down, the more we rely on the internet and centralize infrastructure into electric devices, the more it becomes a costly point of failure.

While many see redundancy as "waste" in terms of dollars, notice that our bodies have many billions of redundant cells and that's what makes us resilient as a species, we can take a licking and keep on ticking.

Trusting your data to out-side sources generally is a bad idea any day of the week. You always want to have backups and data available in case of diaster, mishap, etc.

Like no one has learned from this epidemic yet. Notice that our economic philosophy didn't plan for viral infections and has forced our capitalist society to make serious adjustments. Helping people is an anathema to liberals and conservatives / republicans / democrats, so for void to come along and actually force co-operation was a bit tragically humorous.

As a general rule you need redundancy if you want to survive, behaving as if the cloud is almighty is a bad idea, I'm not sold on "software as a service" or any of that nonsense. It's just there to lull you into a false sense of security.

You always need to plan for the worst case scenario for surviveability reasons.

Normally it's not. But if certain thinks went wrong you might have much less control to fix thinks.

Like consider how many cases of "help big company randomly blocked our account" popped up on hacker news and twitter the recent years.

Also consider news like: "Amazon spies on seller to get a competitive advantage when selling their own products".

Or e.g. companies short term massively changing their service terms or API's. Deprecating old ones etc. This might be fine for customers which products are always changing anyway. But for banks this isn't attractive at all, they only want changes if they are really needed for them.

Systems in the cloud are always going to be less secure than local systems. With cloud you have the same issues with in-house access and data leaking, because you have the same people with access to the same data, PLUS with cloud you also have additional issues with the various third party/parties (over whom you have little control).

Sorry about a slightly off-topic comment. Working on a deep tech startup, with a significant segment of potential customers being national labs, I'm very interested in learning various aspects [beyond the basics] about the process(es) that national labs use to procure application software (not the system one [OS distributions, monitoring etc.], but rather domain-specific one, e.g., scientific data management, modeling and simulations). I have looked at relevant sections on some of the labs' websites and my initial impression is quite fuzzy. If you are familiar with this subject, I would very much appreciate if you could clarify that. If you prefer, you can reach me at aleksandr blekh Google's e-mail service.

P.S. I do have connections at some national labs, but thought that you might shed some additional light on this.

I actually am moving my startups servers from AWS to a home server.

Reasoning:

* We know how much compute is need.

* We know how much the new servers can compute.

* We have the ability to load balance to AWS or Digital Ocean or another service as needed.

* This move provides a 10x speed improvement to our services AND reduces costs by 70%.

For reference, had to call the ISP (AT&T) and they agreed to let me host my current service. It’s relatively low bandwidth, but has high compute requirements.