@bbigford said in Small clients in data centers:
@scottalanmiller said in Small clients in data centers:
Something to think about, with most modern services you have no need a VPN. VPNs are LAN extenders. Old style LAN based designs with tools like AD can need a VPN to make AD keep thinking it is on a LAN, and things like SMB shares basically need a LAN to function. But if you switch from AD to Azure AD, JumpCloud, local accounts, or central managed local accounts, for example, the VPN is unneeded. Same for "modern" storage like NextCloud, no LAN or VPN necessary. Same for modern web apps, they don't care if they are on the LAN or not.
Part of what makes us flexible where we are, is that none of our services or applications are LAN-centric. Without that, we are free to deploy anywhere we want - internal, colocation, VPS, cloud computing, doesn't matter.
I've saw some cost benefits of leveraging our own data center to provide these cloud services to clients. But with certain VPS offerings getting far lower in price, it's nearly impossible to be THAT competitive.
Yeah, you need some huge scale to get your own facility to have benefits. Even if you can get the cost down, you can't match the performance, ease of use, scalability, capacity, geographic diversity, and protections of even the lowest cost players like Vultr.