Your Server vs Cloud – Considerations, Trade-Offs and Costs – Part 3 - Staffing and Management Overheads

Beyond hardware and licensing, day-to-day management requirements often shape the true experience of running server environments.

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Staffing and Management Overheads

Topic	On Premises	Cloud (Microsoft Azure)
Role	You may have an IT team or an MSP who manage the security, firmware, antivirus, monitoring and backups. Therefore, you need to make sure you have someone either in your team or MSP who can understand and safely manage the physical and logical elements of the infrastructure. Someone who can safely replace a PSU, configure cabling correctly, or test a UPS.	Things like physical infrastructure, the datacenter, networking connections, cooling and cabling become part of the service you consume from Microsoft. This can release your IT team or MSP from the need to manage these services and focus on higher-value priorities.
Skillset	If you’re employing a virtualised solution like Hyper-V or VMware, you need people with skills in this technology (which continues to evolve and requires regular patching and updates). It can be challenging to ascertain if the MSP is good at this activity, how many qualified engineers do they have in each area. For example, they may have a number of Microsoft engineers, but how many understand what to do when a Dell storage array has a firmware update required to resolve a critical security bug.	Unlike on-premises or datacenters, Microsoft manages the “platform” element, i.e. there’s no need for customers to update or patch the Hyper-V or VMware-type part of their stack. That’s on Microsoft. There’s still a need to manage some elements of the environment – that’s what either your IT team, an MSP or, ideally, a CSP (Cloud Solution Provider) will do for you. They make sure your cloud environment is running smoothly, control costs and security, ultimately making sure you’re getting the most out of the cloud rather than simply replicating an on-premises environment in the cloud.
Responsibility	Most people backup to a cloud service but in the past cases full of backup tapes were transported around. This might be something you’re doing and therefore carry ownership of.	Microsoft manage these services themselves. If there’s a bug or a security issue, they resolve it. You just get to utilise the resources.

In Summary

Maintaining on-premises infrastructure requires ongoing attention:

Monitoring and updates.
Issue diagnosis and resolution.
Hardware dependencies.

Cloud platforms alter this dynamic by reducing reliance on physical components and centralizing many operational responsibilities within the platform itself.

For organisations, this can translate into:

Fewer infrastructure-related disruptions.
Reduced reactive maintenance effort.
Greater operational continuity.

The comparison is rarely about eliminating responsibility entirely, but about simplifying how environments are supported.

Next, we’ll explore resilience and continuity considerations.

About the author: Liam Freeman is the Infrastructure Director at Klipboard. Klipboard Managed Services, formerly known as Excenta, helps organisations to migrate to, optimise and manage Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 environments - on your own terms. Whether you want full end-to-end management or a co-managed model alongside your IT team, our Microsoft-accredited team deliver a secure, high-performance cloud infrastructure that’s tailor-made to fit your business.

Klipboard Managed Services also specialises in managing the cloud environments for companies in the merchant sector, in particular, users of Epicor – BisTrack and Intact IQ application software. Klipboard Managed Services is engaged with more than 50% of Epicor’s UK BisTrack user base, and a growing number of North American BisTrack users. We have extensive experience in providing and managing the Microsoft Azure cloud environments for firms in the merchant sector.

Find out more here: Klipboard Managed Services