{"id":218,"date":"2026-10-05T21:43:14","date_gmt":"2026-10-05T21:43:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/proit-romania.ro\/private-or-public-cloud\/"},"modified":"2026-10-05T21:43:14","modified_gmt":"2026-10-05T21:43:14","slug":"private-or-public-cloud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/proit-romania.ro\/en\/private-or-public-cloud\/","title":{"rendered":"Private cloud or public cloud: how to choose, workload by workload"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>In brief:<\/strong> the question \u201cprivate cloud or public cloud\u201d rarely has one answer that holds for an entire company. The right answer is given per workload: e-mail and collaboration almost always end up in the public cloud, heavy and predictable applications are often cheaper on your own infrastructure, and most companies in Romania actually run a hybrid.<\/p>\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">What each one actually means<\/h2>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Public cloud<\/strong> means services delivered from a large provider&#8217;s data centres, shared between many customers, paid monthly based on consumption or on the number of users. Microsoft 365, Azure, Google Workspace, Amazon Web Services.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Private cloud<\/strong> means infrastructure dedicated exclusively to your company, virtualised and administered as a service. It can sit in your own office, in a rented data centre (colocation) or hosted at a provider, but on equipment that is not shared.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Two clarifications that shorten many discussions. A single server placed in an office is not a private cloud; it is a server. The difference is made by virtualisation, redundancy, backup and administration as a service. Conversely, \u201cpublic cloud\u201d does not automatically mean your data leaves Europe; we return to that point below.<\/p>\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Cost: compare over five years, not per month<\/h2>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Comparing \u201cmonthly subscription against the price of the server\u201d is misleading, because it ignores half the costs on both sides. An honest comparison is made over the lifetime of the equipment, usually four or five years, and includes everything.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-table\"><table><thead><tr><th>Your own infrastructure<\/th><th>Public cloud<\/th><\/tr><\/thead><tbody>\n<tr><td>Purchase of servers and storage<\/td><td>The monthly subscription or consumption<\/td><\/tr>\n<tr><td>Virtualisation and operating system licences<\/td><td>Licences included or separate, depending on the service<\/td><\/tr>\n<tr><td>UPS, cooling, space, electricity<\/td><td>Data egress traffic<\/td><\/tr>\n<tr><td>Extended warranty and spare parts<\/td><td>Backup, which is rarely included by default<\/td><\/tr>\n<tr><td>Separate backup, local and off site<\/td><td>The cost of the initial migration<\/td><\/tr>\n<tr><td>Administration time, internal or outsourced<\/td><td>Administration time, lower but not zero<\/td><\/tr>\n<tr><td>Replacement every 4-5 years<\/td><td>The provider&#8217;s annual price increases<\/td><\/tr>\n<\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Beyond the figures, the cost structure differs: your own infrastructure is an investment that is depreciated, the public cloud is a running expense, predictable monthly, but one that never stops. For some companies cash flow matters, for others the balance sheet. Talk to your accountant before deciding on technical criteria alone.<\/p>\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">When the public cloud is the obvious choice<\/h2>\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>E-mail, collaboration, working files.<\/strong> Microsoft 365 solves these needs better and more cheaply than almost any local solution. Running your own mail server today means maintenance work with no advantage.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Workloads with variable demand.<\/strong> If you have seasonal peaks or temporary projects, you pay only for what you consume, without buying for the peak.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Companies without their own IT team<\/strong> or with a single person responsible. Fewer things to administer means fewer things that break at two in the morning.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Disaster recovery.<\/strong> A cloud replica of critical systems costs far less than a second site with equipment.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Fast growth or multiple sites.<\/strong> Adding users and locations does not depend on delivery times.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">When your own infrastructure stays better<\/h2>\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>Heavy, constant load.<\/strong> A database that works the same every day, an ERP with dozens of users, virtualisation for internal applications: here the monthly cloud cost quickly exceeds the depreciation of a server.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Large volumes of data that move often.<\/strong> Design, video processing, technical archives. Egress traffic from the cloud is charged, and large files turn a good connection into a bottleneck.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Older applications or licensing tied to hardware.<\/strong> Some production or accounting applications do not work correctly in the cloud or lose vendor support.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Low latency to equipment on the factory floor<\/strong> or in the lab, where network delay matters.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Developing and running AI models.<\/strong> For prototyping and local inference, a dedicated workstation has predictable costs, unlike rented GPU hours. We wrote separately about <a href=\"https:\/\/proit-romania.ro\/en\/dell-pro-max-gb10\/\">Dell Pro Max with GB10<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Contractual requirements<\/strong> from large customers about where and how data is kept.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Hybrid: what most companies actually do<\/h2>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The split that works in practice for a company in Romania with 20 to 200 employees looks roughly like this: e-mail, Teams, current documents and identities in Microsoft 365; ERP, databases, design files and internal applications on your own servers; backup in both directions, meaning one local copy and one in the cloud, in a location other than the office.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The advantage is not only financial. If the internet goes down, people in the office keep working with local applications. If the office burns down, the documents and the e-mail are in the cloud. Each component covers the other&#8217;s weakness.<\/p>\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Where the data sits, and why that does not settle compliance<\/h2>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In February 2025 Microsoft completed the EU Data Boundary, under which customer data and pseudonymised personal data for Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Power Platform and most Azure services are stored and processed in data centres in the European Union and the EFTA area, including technical support data. The argument that \u201cthe data goes to America\u201d no longer describes the situation correctly for these services.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The part often overlooked: responsibility does not move with the data. Under GDPR you remain the data controller, regardless of where it is stored. Under <a href=\"https:\/\/proit-romania.ro\/en\/nis2-romania-guide\/\">NIS2<\/a>, managing supplier-related risk is itself one of the required measures, and the reporting obligations remain the company&#8217;s. Moving to the public cloud changes who operates the server, not who answers for it.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For your own infrastructure, the equivalent question is whether you truly have control: restricted physical access, updates applied, backups tested, logging in place. An unpatched server in the office is not safer than a professionally administered service.<\/p>\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Seven questions that decide it in practice<\/h2>\n<ol class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>What are the workloads, one by one? The decision is made per workload, not per company.<\/li>\n<li>Is the load constant or does it have peaks? Constant leans towards your own equipment, variable towards the cloud.<\/li>\n<li>How large is the data and how often does it move between users and the application?<\/li>\n<li>How long can the company afford to be without each system, and how recent must the last backup be?<\/li>\n<li>Which applications have licensing or compatibility restrictions?<\/li>\n<li>Who administers it, in each option, and what does that time cost?<\/li>\n<li>What do your customers and the applicable legislation require about the location and protection of data?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If you do not have answers to the first four, an infrastructure inventory is the first step, not choosing a provider.<\/p>\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">What we do<\/h2>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">PRO IT works on both sides of this comparison, which lets us advise without an interest in one direction or the other. As a Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider partner we license and administer <a href=\"https:\/\/proit-romania.ro\/en\/microsoft-365\/\">Microsoft 365 and Azure<\/a>. As a Dell Technologies Gold Partner we size and install <a href=\"https:\/\/proit-romania.ro\/en\/dell-hardware\/\">PowerEdge servers<\/a> and network equipment. For the decision itself, the <a href=\"https:\/\/proit-romania.ro\/en\/it-audit\/\">IT audit<\/a> puts the workloads, the real costs of both options and the prioritised recommendations down on paper.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There is no universal answer, and you should not trust a provider who gives you one before seeing your infrastructure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The question has no single answer for an entire company. E-mail belongs in the public cloud, heavy applications are often cheaper on your own servers, and most companies run a hybrid.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":113,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"Private cloud or public cloud: how to choose for your company | PRO IT","_seopress_titles_desc":"An honest comparison between public cloud and your own infrastructure: five-year costs, when each one wins, the hybrid setup, data location and NIS2.","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"cloud privat sau public,cloud public costuri,infrastructura proprie","footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-infrastructure-maintenance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/proit-romania.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/proit-romania.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/proit-romania.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/proit-romania.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/proit-romania.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/proit-romania.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/proit-romania.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/proit-romania.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/proit-romania.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/proit-romania.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}