Many businesses in Piacenza still keep their servers in a rack cabinet in the office or basement. Does it work? Yes — until something goes wrong: a hardware failure, an extended power outage, a ransomware attack, a flood. At that point, the question becomes urgent: “where should our data actually be?”.
For a business in Piacenza, there are three realistic options: on-premise server, local datacentre (housing/colocation) or European cloud datacentre. Let's look at each in detail.
On-premise server: the hidden risk
A server on your own premises seems like the simplest and cheapest choice. In reality, it conceals significant costs and risks:
- Single point of failure— a faulty disk, power supply or network connection can bring the entire business to a halt. Without redundancy, recovery can take days.
- Limited physical security— no 24/7 access control, no dedicated fire suppression system, no flood protection. A rack cabinet in the office is not a datacentre.
- Hidden costs— electricity, cooling, hardware maintenance, software licences, IT staff time. If the server breaks on a Saturday, who steps in?
- Difficult compliance — demonstrating GDPR and NIS2 compliance with a server under the desk is complex and expensive.
European datacentre: the structured choice
A certified European datacentre offers advantages that are impossible to replicate at a single site:
- Full redundancy— power, cooling, connectivity and storage are fully redundant. Tier IV equivalent architectures with a 99.995% uptime target.
- Geographic replication— data replicated across multiple zones in Italy and the EU. If one datacentre has an issue, services continue from another site. Zero downtime.
- Physical and logical security— 24/7 surveillance, biometric access control, fire suppression systems, end-to-end encryption and continuous monitoring.
- Built-in compliance— data residency within the EU, no extra-EU transfers, GDPR and NIS2 compliance by design.
- Predictable costs— no hardware purchases, no surprises. You pay for what you use and scale when you need to.
“But my data is safer if I keep it here”
This is the most common belief, and it's understandable. But security does not depend on physical proximity — it depends on infrastructure, processes and expertise. A European datacentre certified to ISO/IEC 27001, 27017 and 27018 provides levels of protection that no on-premise server can match — neither physically, logically nor organisationally.
The key is having a local IT partner in Piacenza who manages the cloud infrastructure for you: someone who knows your business, your systems and your priorities, and who operates on enterprise-grade infrastructure.
How to migrate: a journey, not a leap of faith
Cloud migration does not have to be traumatic. A structured approach involves: assessment of the existing infrastructure, cloud environment design, phased planning with a rollback plan, testing, deployment and validation. No interruptions, no surprises.
And if not everything needs to go to the cloud, that's fine: hybrid architectures allow you to keep some workloads on-premise and move the rest to the cloud, connected via secure site-to-site VPNs.