In-House Sever
| Pros |
Cons |
| Gives you physical control over your backup. |
Requires a capital investment in hardware and infrastructure. |
| Keeps critical data in-house. No third party has access to your information. |
Needs space in your office for a rack or server room/closet, in addition to dedicated IT support. |
| No need to rely on an Internet connection for access to data. |
May be more susceptible to data loss during disaster situations due to its in-house location. How often you take the data offsite will reflect how much data you’ll lose in an emergency. |
| Can be more cost-effective for small to mid-sized companies. |
No uptime or recovery time guarantees. |
Cloud Server
| Pros |
Cons |
| No need for onsite hardware or capital expenses. Well-suited to smaller companies that may outgrow storage too quickly. |
The costs of the data recovery could outweigh the benefits for companies that are not as dependent on uptime and instant recovery. |
| Storage can be added as needed. Solutions are often on-demand, so you only pay for what you need. |
Every organization will have a limit to data that can be stored in the cloud due to storage availability and cost. |
| Backup and restore can be initiated from anywhere, using any computer, tablet, or smartphone. |
If the Internet goes down on your side or on your cloud provider’s side, you won’t have access to any of your information. |
| Data can be backed up in the cloud as regularly as 15-minute intervals, minimizing data losses in disaster situations. Small data set recovery time is improved. |
Full data recovery could prove very time-consuming and impactful on systems. |
Fog
Tech’s future may lie in the “fog” rather than the cloud. In other words, cloud solutions are great, but businesses may not want to have everything “out there” in the cloud. Some solutions will still need to be kept in-house or on the device, closer to the ground. For many companies, the best configuration will be somewhere in between, which the article refers to as “the fog”.