Das Auto ist eine vorübergehende Erscheinung. Ich glaube an das Pferd
Kaiser Wilhem II, 1905
When discussing the migration of on-premises infrastructure to the cloud, we frequently encounter strong reservations. We would like to address these concerns. Moving to the cloud is no passing fad - it is the direction in which IT infrastructure is rapidly evolving. Businesses that resist this shift risk falling behind.
To help you avoid sharing the fate of Kaiser Wilhelm II and his famous remark, let us address the concerns behind these reservations:
- I prefer to keep my data on my own premises, where it is safer
That can be a false sense of security. Almost five years ago, one of our customers arrived at the office on a Monday morning to find nothing left but a broken office chair.
Brazen thieves had pulled up in a lorry over the weekend and taken everything , including the servers and the backups.
This would not have happened in a modern cloud data centre, where round-the-clock security teams and some rather intimidating guard dogs are there to prevent precisely this sort of thing.
Centralised backup management also makes it easier to monitor backups more thoroughly and consistently in cloud environments than in on-premises setups.
- Cloud systems are more vulnerable because they are hosted in publicly accessible data centres
Technically, this assessment is incorrect. The relevant distinction is between systems that are accessible from outside and those that are isolated. Externally accessible systems are potentially vulnerable unless appropriate firewalls protect them.
By this definition, most on-premises systems today are externally accessible: there are VPN connections for branch offices and staff working from home, access to the company’s Exchange server, public-facing connections to the alarm system and rooftop solar installation, company Wi-Fi that can still be reached from the car park at three in the morning, and a live network socket on the outside wall by the loading bay.
For a potential attacker, it makes no difference whether the target IP address belongs to a cloud data centre or your office internet connection.
Cloud environments are typically less vulnerable in this respect because their firewall infrastructure is centrally managed, kept up to date and regularly maintained.
Over the years, we have developed extensive expertise in cloud virtualisation at a wide range of scales.
We currently operate and manage four large Proxmox VE clusters hosted at Hetzner, with a total of
2116 CPU Cores
14TB RAM
360 TB of redundant Ceph storage
Our approach to cluster virtualisation rests on two pillars:
The data centres
Hetzner Online GmbH
Hetzner operates three large, ISO 27001-certified data centres in Nuremberg, Falkenstein in the Vogtland region, and Helsinki, each covering several thousand square metres. We have been a Hetzner customer for many years and value the team’s expertise and flexibility, particularly their round-the-clock availability and highly professional support. Our monthly expenditure on bare-metal servers rented from Hetzner is currently a five-figure euro sum - money well spent.
The virtualisation stack
Proxmox VE
Proxmox VE is an open-source virtualisation platform that supports a wide range of deployments, from single-server setups for small and medium-sized businesses to large high-availability clusters. It is developed by Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH in Vienna, which provides professional support for the platform.
Our Proxmox VE clusters use redundant, NVMe-based Ceph storage in a hyperconverged architecture. Backups are handled by Proxmox Backup Server in separate data centres.
Alongside Proxmox, we also have extensive experience with large oVirt and VMWare clusters. If you need assistance in this area, please get in touch.
If you are looking for support with your existing Microsoft Hyper-V infrastructure, we are happy to help with single-server deployments for small and medium-sized businesses. For Hyper-V cluster installations, we recommend working with a specialist who has greater expertise in that area.