One of the first decisions every company faces in its digital transformation is the choice between cloud and on-premise: hosting your infrastructure on a provider like Scaleway or on servers managed internally within the company. It is a choice that affects costs, security, scalability and compliance for years, and there is no one-size-fits-all answer. What changes the outcome is evaluating it against your real workloads, not against technology trends. In our assessment we always start from the use case: type of applications, regulatory requirements, predictability of the workload and available budget.
In short, the cloud is worthwhile when you need rapid scalability, operating costs proportional to usage and a short time-to-market, without tying up capital in hardware. The on-premise approach still makes sense when there are latency constraints towards production machinery, hardware investments that have already been amortized, or requirements that mandate full physical control of the systems. For many industrial SMEs the best answer is a hybrid model, which keeps critical systems on site and moves variable workloads, backups and new digital services to the cloud.
| Selection criterion | Cloud (Scaleway) | On-Premise |
|---|
| Upfront costs | No hardware investment, operating cost (OpEx) proportional to usage | High initial investment in servers and infrastructure (CapEx) |
| Scalability | Immediate and flexible: resources added or reduced in minutes | Limited by the hardware purchased; slow and costly expansion |
| Maintenance and updates | Handled by the provider; patches and redundancy managed | Handled by the internal IT team; requires dedicated skills |
| Data sovereignty and control | Data in Italy with the Milan data center, subject to European law | Total physical control, data always within the company |
| Provisioning times | Environments ready in a few hours, ideal for a short time-to-market | Weeks or months between purchase, installation and configuration |
| Disaster recovery and continuity | Native backup, geographic redundancy and high availability | To be designed and funded internally, often with a secondary site |
| GDPR compliance | Native with a European provider, no extra-EU transfers | Under the full responsibility of the company, including physical security |
When the workload is stable and predictable and the hardware has already been amortized, on-premise can have a competitive TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) over 3-5 years. When, on the other hand, the workload is variable, the projects are new, or you need test and development environments to spin up and shut down quickly, the cloud clearly reduces costs and timelines. For modern container-based architectures we help you design managed clusters with Kubernetes and Docker, while for a broader picture of your IT infrastructure you can start from our ICT consulting. The goal is always the same: to choose the infrastructure your business needs, not the trendiest one.
