1
Weigh control against convenience
- Cloud services reduce operational burden but limit customisation and data sovereignty.
- Self-hosted gives full control but requires in-house skills for patching, backups, and security.
- Hybrid approaches let you keep sensitive workloads local while using cloud for commodity services.
2
Understand the real cost picture
- Cloud subscriptions are predictable monthly costs but compound quickly as you scale users or storage.
- Self-hosted has higher upfront investment but lower long-term cost for stable, well-understood workloads.
- Factor in staff time for maintenance, upgrades, and incident response when comparing total cost of ownership.
3
Check compliance and data location requirements
- Some sectors and data types require UK or EU data residency that not all cloud providers guarantee.
- Review data processing agreements and understand where backups, logs, and analytics data are stored.
- Document your hosting decisions so auditors and stakeholders can see the rationale clearly.