At CST Group we’ve been slowly migrating a lot of our services to the cloud. In the old days we’d host everything in house. There’s still a lot to be said for that – you can hear when a hard drive in a server is about to go tits up, and you can smell when a power supply has boiled one of its capacitors. It’s great for control freaks who want to manage everything, but there’s no getting away from the fact that it takes a lot of time and effort to keep everything running.
When you reach that point where it all becomes too much, you have two options: either move all of your existing kit into a data centre somewhere, or start using cloud computing resources. Or, perhaps, a mixture of the two. Data centre operation means you’ll no longer be paying for the multiple leased lines you need if you’re doing your own hosting on-site, but it does generally mean you’ll still be responsible for managing and maintaining the hardware; it’s just that it now lives in someone else’s racks. If a server or a switch fails in the middle of the night you’ll still need one of your engineers to turn out to fix it, and the data centre might be some distance away.
The alternative is cloud computing, where you simply spin up a new machine from a web interface, and if anything goes wrong it’s up to the cloud provider to fix it – although the servers are often configured in a
