Cloud vs Physical Server

[dmj]

 

Worst case is someone digs through your fiber line, and it takes a week to fix, chance of happening, say, 1 in a million days

 

 

Funny you should say that, I went to great lengths to get two FTTP providers, terminating at different exchanges. Total redundancy. I thought, until contractors went through both cables when digging the road elsewhere. Normal chaos ensued.

[TechMonkey]

the relatively small investment and costs involved

 

You'd be surprised. We were looking at £26k for a second line to be brought on site, not even to the building, at a previous school I worked at, coming from a completely different exchange, and ensuring a different route.

We were semi-rural so that may have had an effect, but it isn't as easy as you may think.

[TwistedHelixis]

They want to do it to save costs of the support/off-site backup.

You should still have backups. Its a requirement from our insurance company that we have both offsite and offline backups, even though all our data is cloud based.

[nicholab]

Just bare in mind that you will want E3+ security for staff as you minimum. Lift and shift my be required for some service but remember cloud first is normally more cost effective. Don't be put off lift and shift as it often easier to move from Azure L&S to a cloud native service. Let say you want to go cloud but your MIS will slow it down as you are moving to a cloud MIS well do a lift and shift on that.

 

With backup make sure all of you cloud service are covered either by the cloud provider solution or a third party/on-site.

Edited May 16, 2023 by nicholab

[djm968]

You'd be surprised. We were looking at £26k for a second line to be brought on site, not even to the building, at a previous school I worked at.

Not surprised at all, we had to pay £26k ECCs (excess construction charges) for a leased line installation at one of our sites. Unfortunately, they are quite rural too.

[mavhc]

Funny you should say that, I went to great lengths to get two FTTP providers, terminating at different exchanges. Total redundancy. I thought, until contractors went through both cables when digging the road elsewhere. Normal chaos ensued.

 

I'd get 1 VM cable and 1 openreach so they'd likely go via different paths

[nicholab]

I'd get 1 VM cable and 1 openreach so they'd likely go via different paths

 

I would get 1 Openreach and another either Cityfibre or another reginal provider. If it is a secondary line it does not need to be the same spec so you could have LL and a FTTP business connection.

[HPlum78]

Cityfiber is about to be called virgin O2 shortly... if they get their own way.

[localzuk]

One thing to note is that in some areas, regardless of who you choose for your leased line you may end up with an OpenReach line anyway... That's what we have here. Doesn't matter who we choose as the retailer, they all end up using an OpenReach line.

 

So for redundancy, we'd end up with 2 OR lines. Unless we get FTTC (as FTTP isn't a thing here yet)... And that's fairly limited too.

 

So there will be limits to what you can do for backup lines for a lot of places.

Edited May 16, 2023 by localzuk

[foofighterjim]

Is 4G/5G on a fixed IP really not a possibility for any of you? I know in rural areas you're likely short on options for all types of connectivity, but it really is the only way to get around the potential "ground works" issues.

[localzuk]

Is 4G/5G on a fixed IP really not a possibility for any of you? I know in rural areas you're likely short on options for all types of connectivity, but it really is the only way to get around the potential "ground works" issues.

For us, 4G is available at 50% of our sites. The other 50% barely get 3G and often have no signal at all.

[jmak]

In a previous life I worked for a company supplying data networks. Our guaranteed redundant connection with guaranteed diverse routing was really expensive. We had several customers who thought they'd save money by buying one connection from us and the backup from someone else. Several came unstuck as various suppliers either shared ducts or exchange buildings somewhere along the route.

 

I think the best emergency option might be mobile data. Obviously wouldn't be brilliant for data heavy applications, but to allow things like connection to cloud mis it would be useful. It'd probably be ok for quite a lot of O365 functions too. Either editing cloud based documents or incremental changes to a local document uses very little data. Teams and video streaming - not so much.

[mavhc]

There's also Starlink now