I selfhosted my Nextcloud and really enjoyed it for personal use. One of my friends took a look into it and thought that it could be a good thing for his company that employees +200 people and growing… They are currently using Google Workspace but want to ditch it completely in favor of something that they can control themselves. So here’s my question, is it worth to use NextCloud on a company of this size, is there a better alternative? Or should they just keep using Megacorporation’s cloud solutions? If it is worth it, how much should I charge them for hosting it and doing the implementation and support?
Unless the data you hold is so sensitive that it cannot be stored in the cloud, I think a cloud approach is the way to go. That way you get predictable costs and reliable uptime
I wouldn’t recommend it, a company that size is going to need to guarantee uptime and performance and they are going to need a big cap-ex purchase on servers and storage networks to get it done and get enterprise support and hire staff to maintain it.
For a smaller company that already has the infrastructure to run it, it makes a bit more sense but I wouldn’t recommend it for a small company with nothing or a large company that’s already moved to cloud.
Just one man’s opinion though, I don’t know the situation.
Shouldn’t me more convenient for bigger company where there already is a good and big IT department? Sure they need hardware and to allocate people dedicated to that, but cloud storage is costs too.
I got really long winded on this one sorry. TL;DR yes it would be easier for a big company’s IT department to handle rolling their own nextcloud but larger companies also have more obligations that make it a bit more complicated. A smaller company will need less compute and storage and manhours to manage a next cloud instance and so they can get away with it if they have a great IT person/staff
An on-premises deployment is going to take more manpower to support and maintain than a cloud deployment and an organization of 200 like OP is probably going to have 5-6 IT people who are already stretched thin.
And cloud storage is definitely a cost just like on-premises but it also comes with SLAs with guaranteed uptime and has factors of scale to be able to make delivering uptime, performance, security, and updates a lot more cost effective than rolling your own nextcloud. I’m sure it can be done in a way that is cheaper than $4000 a month or whatever 200 workspace licenses cost but not without taking a shortcut. I wouldn’t run it without a dev, prod, backup and DR server and the salary to maintain those would be just as high.
I’m making assumptions based on my experience and organization’s size and making an educated guess about his friends situation. It could be totally different and they could still have capable hardware and storage from before their cloud migration. I just know that if I was in the same position I would not want to be the one in charge of rolling the company nextcloud when down time is money lost.
Yeah, for enterprise you aren’t going to roll it out yourself. They’d use a partner company to help you set it up and configure it for their needs to ensure that it can continue to scale and provide monitoring solutions. It’s too much for one person to do that.
Where are you hosting it? Onsite? Megacorporation’s clod solution? Your cable line? What’s your data recovery plan? 200+ users can generate a lot of data. What’s the security plan? You do know how to harden every aspect of each subsystem, right? What’s the monitoring plan? Not just “is it down” but way more granular for each subsystem. How many tech and phone support people will be on call to help?
You could probably roll it out in a way that would work, but at that scale you should really be using a pro. Especially for a “friend”. Don’t want a tech problem to kill that friendship.
useful thing to remember about these systems: you fuck up and it’s a high likelihood literally nobody at the company can do any work because all their files are inaccessible
that’s like… $10000/hr in lost man hours alone, let alone reputation from not being able to respond to customers accurately, possibly missed SLAs or other contract obligations
unless your company is all about tech, it’s highly unlikely your IT team has the skills necessary to take on that level of responsibility
I once did an internship at a small (think 10 people) company that was selfhosting all their stuff. I was asked to fiddle with the services and (of course) caused a downtime of a few hours. Boy were they pissed. Now, when I think back, I can’t believe they were selfhosting that shit.
I think the key question is to ask what about Googles solution is driving them to look elsewhere. Once that’s known it’s possible to work out if NextCloud deployed in house or via a partner is the right way forward, or if another cloud offering might be more suitable.
My biggest issue with Nextcloud is there is no LTS version. Employees do NOT like things constantly changing, and Nextcloud has some pretty major changes every 4-6 months. As an admin you really have to keep up to date, or you run into trouble, not just with security, but with trying to upgrade later, as you can’t upgrade across major versions.
In my opinion, a 2-3 year supported LTS version would make Nextcloud way more attractive to hosting in stable environments.
