Rethinking the Cloud: How Hybrid IT Lowers Costs and Strengthens Security

A hybrid IT model gives businesses the freedom to run workloads where they make the most financial and operational sense.

The Cloud Isn’t Always the Cheapest Option

Cloud computing revolutionized how businesses deploy and scale technology — but for many small and mid-sized organizations, the cost equation has shifted.

Usage-based pricing, data-transfer fees, currency changes and ever-rising license costs have turned predictable IT budgets into fluctuating monthly invoices. What once looked like a simple way to cut expenses can now quietly drain resources.

For example, suppliers like AWS and Azure will allow you on certain services fix pricing for up to 3 years. With a Dataforge solution the price could be fixed to 8 years or more. We routinely have even large systems running for 8+ years -- that alone is a huge change in monthly costs.

The cloud still has immense value, but today’s smartest approach blends local performance and control with cloud flexibility and resilience. If you need to setup an application right away that can scale from 10 users to 20,000 users variably and you need 3 geo-located replicas in real time -- than a provider like AWS/Azure is likely the platform you want to use.

We continue to see a market with our on-premise servers. It's growing. Some workloads of course move to the cloud, but some are moving back to on-premise (especially storage). Dataforge invested heavily in modern on-premise virtualization like CEPH, Proxmox and ZFS. In the end, we can just deliver the same redundancy and performance of any cloud provider at a much lower cost. If you are in the construction industry for example and storing a lot of job related video, pictures, site plans etc. We are going to save you a lot of money with your storage.
Dan Forsyth, Dataforge Inc.

The Hybrid IT Advantage: Best of Both Worlds

A hybrid IT model gives businesses the freedom to run workloads where they make the most financial and operational sense.

Local Proxmox + Ceph infrastructure powers daily operations, shared files, and core business applications with LAN-speed performance.
Cloud services are reserved for targeted use cases like massive scalable workloads, geographic disaster recovery and AI.

This balanced approach typically reduces overall IT costs considerably while delivering greater stability and security.

Why “Local” No Longer Means “Old-School”

Modern on-premise systems have evolved far beyond the traditional server room.

Technologies such as Proxmox and Ceph bring enterprise-grade capabilities to regional businesses:
- Built-in high availability
- Self-healing distributed storage
- Lightning-fast local-network performance
- Automatic offsite replication to a second Dataforge facility
- Onsite or datacenter hosted

At Dataforge, these become private micro-clouds — compact, efficient, and fully managed environments that live inside your office or within our datacenter.
They provide the same reliability as public cloud platforms at up to 70 percent lower lifetime cost.

Those gains come from simplification, eliminating recurring cloud overhead, avoiding data-egress fees, fixing hardware costs (including currency) and extending hardware lifespans — without sacrificing speed or reliability.

All Backups Stay in Canada — On Dataforge Hardware

Every backup and replica managed by Dataforge is stored exclusively within Canada, on Dataforge or customer owned hardware — never on foreign-controlled infrastructure.

That matters because many global cloud providers are headquartered outside Canada, where national security laws can permit foreign-government access to hosted data.

By keeping your information on systems physically located in Burlington and Hamilton as well as local ownership, you ensure Canadian data residency, privacy compliance, and client confidence — with no third-party exposure.

When the Internet Goes Down, You Don’t

Pure-cloud setups rely entirely on Internet connectivity.
If the link fails, so does access to your systems.

Hybrid IT keeps your business running even during outages — files, accounting, and internal apps remain fully accessible over the local network.
That resilience directly protects productivity and revenue.

The Bottom Line

Cloud infrastructure remains a powerful tool, but it isn’t automatically cost-effective.
A hybrid model allows you to:
- Control your data and your costs
- Reduce recurring IT expenses by half or more
- Maintain full data sovereignty on Canadian-owned hardware
- Enhance security and business continuity

For Burlington and Hamilton businesses, hybrid IT represents the best of both worlds — efficient, compliant, and built for long-term value.

Ready to Rethink Your IT Strategy?

Dataforge Canada designs and manages hybrid IT environments using Proxmox, Ceph, ZFS storage and Veeam Cloud Connect — all hosted on Canadian soil and owned by Canadians.