alt Hacker NewsThe lowest grade I got in my business degree was in the "IT management" course. That's because the ONLY acceptable answer to any business IT problem is to move everything to the cloud. Renting is ALWAYS better than owning because you transfer cost and risk to a 3rd party.
That's pretty much the dogma of the 2010s.
It doesn't matter that my org runs a line-of-business datacentre that is a fraction of the cost of public cloud. It doesn't matter that my "big" ERP and admin servers take up half a rack in that datacentre. MBA dogma says that I need to fire every graybeard sysadmin, raze our datacentre facility to the ground, and move to AWS.
Fun fact, salaries and hardware purchases typically track inflation, because switching cost for hardware is nil and hiring isn't that expensive. Whereas software is usually 5-10% increases every year because they know that vendor lock-in and switching costs for software are expensive.
Right, but is that a like for like comparison?
AWS has redundant data centres across the world and within each region. A file in S3 will never be lost, even if you store it for a thousand years.
What happens if your city has a tornado and your data centre gets hit? Is your company now dead?
And how much do you spend on all these sysadmins? 200k each? If you’re saving 20k/month by paying 100k/month in salaries, you aren’t saving anything.