In the first article of our the “Why Go Serverless?” series, we discussed reasons why a firm could benefit from switching from a local physical on-premises infrastructure to a hosted one.
In part 2 of this series, we are discussing the costs and benefits of making the switch to serverless. There are four main benefits to going serverless – better security, more resources, greater flexibility, and overall cost savings.
Security.
With the sophistication of cyber threats on the rise, even IT professionals are struggling. Family offices (and most of their infrastructure management providers) do not have the resources to keep up.
Due to their size, family offices tend to lack server volume, training/depth of the technical team, and focus that a bank or application service provider has in order to stay in front of these security issues.
Resources.
In a cloud environment, a family office can leverage the resources of a much larger company.
With Microsoft Azure, for example, your organization can benefit from Azure's SOC 2 compliant physical site security. Within an application like Addepar or Intacct, you are leveraging their entire infrastructure team for backup, patches, and business continuity. Often these application providers are even leveraging Azure or AWS servers under their own applications.
Flexibility.
In some cloud-based server systems, you can throttle your computing resources up and down, based on need. This flexibility provides a savings on long-term costs.
Physical servers need more resources and require expensive purchases; physical servers needing fewer resources during certain times of day cannot be throttled down to save on costs. They must be built for peak performance periods.
In a cloud-based server environment, you can throttle computing resources up or down, i.e., from a virtual desktop for an intern to a SQL server that might have nightly loads, batch reports or large performance calculation intervals.
Distributed Cost.
In terms of costs, physical servers involve large, lump-sum costs for upkeep ($50K to $60K every few years to replace hardware), as well as high recurring costs (hundreds of dollars per server per month for MSP management).
Cloud-based solutions, in contrast, are subscription-based: costs are spread out and predictable. While they are not always less expensive, the costs are more evenly spread to meet the need. You can increase or decrease the resources on an ad-hoc basis as business needs change and evolve.
At the end of the day, eliminating your physical server is a business decision and should be approached with careful thought and consideration. At InfoGrate, we can guide you through this process, from the analysis to the decision, and then through the search and implementation. If you think going serverless might be the right decision for you, please email us at info@infograte.com.
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