IT infrastructure from Cologne – planned, not just grown

Not necessarily. For email, collaboration and Office, Microsoft 365 is the better solution in most cases. Applications with large data volumes, strict latency requirements or special data protection requirements, on the other hand, often continue to run more economically on an on-site server. We calculate both options over five years before you decide.

The preparation – assessment, planning, building and testing the new environment – takes two to six weeks, depending on scope. We schedule the actual switchover for a maintenance window in the evening or at the weekend, and it typically takes four to twelve hours. Ideally, all your staff notice on Monday is that everything runs faster.

With virtualisation, several logical servers run on one physical machine. This reduces hardware, power consumption and space requirements. The bigger advantage, however, lies in operation: a virtual machine can be backed up, copied, moved to other hardware and restored after an outage within minutes. We work with Hyper-V and VMware.

Often yes – at least in part. Desktop computers, switches and storage systems can often continue to be used or be repurposed for non-critical tasks. During the assessment we tell you clearly what makes sense to keep and what should be replaced for security or maintenance reasons.

Yes. We procure servers, network equipment, desktop computers and peripherals through our distribution partners and take care of warranty extensions and maintenance contracts. If you prefer, also as a leasing or rental model, should you want to spread the investment over the term.

Yes, via VPN, Remote Desktop Services or Microsoft 365 access – depending on which applications your staff need from outside the office. What matters is security: multi-factor authentication, encrypted connections and a permissions concept that also applies when working from home.

The purchase price of the hardware is the smaller part. On top of that come the operating system and virtualisation, client access licences per user or device, an uninterruptible power supply, setup and data transfer, and the vendor maintenance contract – without which there is no next-business-day replacement part if something breaks.

Over the usual service life of five years, these additional items often add up to more than the device itself. If you only compare the purchase price, you are comparing the wrong thing.

Our Guides section has a detailed comparison with a calculator into which you can enter your own figures.

For businesses with fewer than fifty workstations, the sensible route almost always has three stages, in this order: first email and collaboration, then file storage, and last – if at all – the line-of-business application.

The first two stages bring the greatest benefit at the lowest risk: working from anywhere, no more in-house mail server, automatic updates. The third stage is the tricky one, because line-of-business applications are often tied to low latency and their vendors do not always support running them in the cloud.

What is not on the provider's invoice but is part of the picture: your own backup, sufficient bandwidth and a second internet line as a fallback.

There is no general answer, because items are regularly missing on both sides. With your own server, the running costs are underestimated; with the cloud, the one-off migration and everything that comes on top of the provider's invoice.

As a rule of thumb from practice: with large data volumes and old line-of-business applications, your own server usually wins; with distributed sites and a lot of mobile working, the cloud does. Very often, however, the right answer is a mixed solution – and that is not a compromise born of indecision, but often the cheapest and most robust option.