Here’s the reality: no matter your industry, company size, or growth pattern, every business should be talking about cloud hosting.
It’s true across the board: reliable hosting solutions have become essential for daily operations, client management, and data security.
Three main approaches dominate the market:
1. DIY Public Cloud: Do-It-Yourself by going directly to a public cloud provider, such as Microsoft's Azure, Amazon's AWS, or Google's GCP.
2. Managed Public Cloud: Same as above, but you use a third-party to deploy, manage, and secure your public cloud solution.
3. Private Cloud: Third party owned and managed proprietary "mystery cloud."
While all three options technically offer a path to cloud-based performance, they differ significantly in cost, control, security, and scalability. Understanding these differences can help business leaders make the best decision for their organization’s long-term IT strategy.
DIY (Do-It-Yourself) public cloud means that your internal IT team manages all aspects of your cloud infrastructure in-house. This might involve setting up servers through a cloud platform like Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services (AWS), managing configurations, implementing security protocols, and performing regular updates and maintenance.
DIY hosting provides greater control over how resources are deployed and customized. However, it also requires significant technical expertise and time investment. For firms without dedicated cloud specialists, DIY hosting can quickly drain internal resources and leave the environment vulnerable to misconfigurations or security gaps.
The second option organizations can consider is going direct to public cloud. Also called managed public cloud, this is a service model where a third-party provider, often a Managed Service Provider (MSP), sets up, monitors, and maintains your cloud environments. This includes provisioning servers, performing updates, managing backups, handling security configurations, and ensuring uptime.
As MSPs, we do this at PK Tech, using Microsoft Azure as our hosting provider.
For mid-sized firms in Phoenix, managed public hosting can be particularly beneficial because it allows teams to focus on core business goals instead of troubleshooting infrastructure issues. With 24/7 support, proactive monitoring, and access to technical expertise, managed hosting takes the complexity out of cloud operations while providing enterprise-level reliability.
In contrast to public cloud hosting, private cloud hosting in this context refers to an IT vendor's proprietary cloud offering.
A private cloud typically consists of an IT vendor renting space in a data center, placing physical servers in a rack, and the vendor being responsible for everything from security to hardware refreshes. Commonly, these servers are shared with all their clients.
Here's what you need to ask yourself: Do I trust this IT vendor to securely run my business in their cloud? Microsoft spends over $1 billion annually on securing Azure. Can they do it better and at what price point? What is your exit plan if you want to pull your data out? If one of their servers were to fail, how much downtime would your business experience? Spoiler: Microsoft/Amazon/Google have clean solutions to this, private cloud not so much.
Our take on this: private cloud has massive margins for the IT vendor. A successful relationship with a client requires a balanced approach that is fair to all parties. Private cloud puts too much power in the hands of IT vendors because they can hold all the cards. You don't know how modern the hardware is, if they even know how to secure their cloud, and how painful it is to leave them. With our approach to Microsoft Azure, you own your data and can transfer the services directly to another partner with no downtime.
One final point on private cloud is this: consider that private equity has acquired nearly all the successful private cloud providers over the last few years for a reason. Rightworks, CloudIT, Adopt Technologies, and many more. Private equity loves the massive margins because it crams as many clients as possible onto old hardware, cuts corners to increase margin, and makes it so painful to leave that most clients have to stick it out because they can't afford to be down for two weeks to wait for the export of data.
For most mid-sized firms in Phoenix, Managed Public Cloud Hosting strikes the best balance of security, cost-effectiveness, and ability to scale.
While there is a time and a place for DIY and private cloud hosting options, there is a reason we, at PK Tech, focus on public cloud hosting with Microsoft Azure.
Here’s the hard truth about today’s business landscape: outsourcing cloud management to a trusted provider isn’t just convenient, it’s a strategic investment in your firm’s long-term success.
Does your firm have questions about how to invest in the best cloud hosting solution for your business?
PK Tech can help! Contact us today for a complimentary audit of your current cloud hosting environment and recommendations specific to your business.