
Ask HN: What reasons do you have for not moving to the cloud? - arnon
If you&#x27;re working on-prem, what are your reasons for staying there, rather than moving to the cloud?
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jmnicolas
\- Internet down, nobody can work (it happens to us once or twice a year,
between a few minutes and a few hours).

\- latency : we have one cloud app that is a pain to use since latency and
sometimes bandwidth are not good enough (it got better since we got fiber, but
still).

\- our suppliers are very old school (one of them is still using Visual Studio
2008 for crying out loud) : we have to work around them, even "despite" them
in certain instances.

\- costs would not go down, they certainly would go up for a "worse" service

The only thing that cloud would give me is the peace of mind of not having to
manage servers (if everything was serverless or managed by suppliers that is).

~~~
arnon
Assuming you go full "SaaS" \- are you really saving IT resources, or are they
just going to be doing other things on a different platform?

~~~
jmnicolas
Sorry I don't understand your question.

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ludjer
\- High single instance reliability. I have ~1000 EC2 instances; every week I
get a notification how an instance has been restarted to move it off failing
hardware. I never got these in my DC

\- Consistent large scale workloads at low latency. Nothing beats low latency
then bare-metal servers. Also, it costs significantly cheaper running large
clusters on bare-metal then in the cloud. If you move to the cloud, you need
to use the cloud services else your costs are astronomically higher.

\- If you already have datacenters that have been paid off why move to the
cloud. Use your own data centers and run a hybrid cloud.

I think there is a reason allot of big tech companies roll their own cloud or
do some kind of hybrid approach. Whe nyou running a app that is core to your
infrastructure you do not want to rely on another persons hardware you want
100% control of everything. I have had route 53 cause issues, S3 cause issues,
EC2 servers get stuck and there is nothing you can do but wait 15 min for the
enterprise SLA of AWS. In a business critical system, 15 min is not good
enough. You need your operations techie to be sprinting to the rack to hit the
reset button. Just my experience.

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peterbozso
As a consultant I work almost exclusively with enterprise customers using
Azure. When moving to the cloud for some of them the most regular reasons to
keep stuff on-prem are:

* Regulation: it's mostly about data can't leave the given country's border. There's usually not much you can do about it. Offload stuff to the cloud what you can (computing), keep on-prem what you must (data). In these cases the integration between the two environments can be a real challenge sometimes. But Azure is quite strong on that front.

* Stupid company policies set up during the last century or recently, but by people stuck in the last century. In some cases these can either be worked around or changed if you know the right people. But there's a lot of cases when it's hopeless from the start. Totally depends on company culture.

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segmondy
Money. I have a $5 VPS for my personal stuff. If I ever have anything else
that needs more computing power than that, I'm going to run it from a server
under my desk unless people pay enough to cover the cost.

~~~
quickthrower2
I'm using the Digital Ocean $5/month on a site, running Nginx & NodeJS,
admittedly low load but boy the uptime has been great and $5/m. Just create an
ubuntu droplet, couple of apt-get commands and you are up and running with a
server :-).

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notlukesky
In many markets there are regulatory regimes that prevent a migration to the
cloud especially in sectors like banking and government departments.

~~~
arnon
It seems that even in Germany and France, many finance companies are moving to
the cloud.

Is this still a problem today?

~~~
huhnmonster
From my own experience (finance), still no cloud services in use. It is
strictly forbidden to share any data with the outside world, whether that be
in the form of Google Sheets or some other platform outside of a corporate
network. If something moves out, shit hits the fan pretty quickly, once
someone finds out.

Everything not on-premise is a no-go from the start, which sucks.

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muzani
One company I worked with had been around before cloud. They had plenty of
server space (about a few building levels of servers) and even a backup power
generator. I suppose they would move to cloud if they could, but at that level
of scale and uptime, they might as well be the cloud.

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gitgud
There's still laws in _some countries_ which require; on site storage, data-
center in the country, weird periodic audits... All these are barriers to
_moving to the cloud_

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sloaken
Quality of internet - little to no redundency if the primary drops.

Speed of internet.

Trust that cloud companies are not: A) Selling my info B) Using it against me

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billconan
data/source code security

cost saving.

