"Should we move everything to the cloud?", probably the question we get most often. The answer nobody likes to hear: it depends. But it depends on things that can be laid out quite clearly.
What the cloud genuinely delivers
Cloud applications, from Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace to specialised business tools, bring three things that are hard to argue with.
No infrastructure worries. Upgrades, security patches, redundancy. It's all baked into the subscription. A server dying on Friday evening stops being your problem.
Work from anywhere. Documents, email and applications are available from the office, from home and from the field, on any device. For companies with field work or multiple locations, that's a massive difference.
Predictable cost. Instead of a multi-thousand-euro investment every five years, a monthly per-user subscription that scales up and down with your team.
What gets glossed over
Subscriptions add up. Five euros here, twelve there, and suddenly you're paying a serious monthly sum, partly for tools nobody uses. A regular subscription audit often "finds" hundreds of euros a year.
Your data lives with someone else. For most business data that's acceptable with good configuration, but for sensitive data you need to know exactly where it sits, who can access it and whether you're GDPR-compliant. "Somewhere in the cloud" is not an answer that passes.
No internet, no anything. If your connection drops and everything is in the cloud. Everything stops. A serious setup therefore always includes a backup link.
Hybrid: the answer for most
In practice, a combination usually works best: email, calendars and office tools in the cloud, while specialised applications, large data volumes or systems that must keep working without internet stay local, on your own hardware. Alongside that, one rule always applies: backups exist independently of where the data lives, because even cloud subscriptions have fine print.
The right decision doesn't start with technology but with a list: which applications you use, which data is critical, and what happens to the business if any of it is down for an hour. Put that on paper, and the answer usually reveals itself.