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Comment by ZuLuuuuuu | Hacker News Reader

A few questions:

- Is your company mainly a software company?

- How much time do you spend on a week on maintaining your servers?

- How do you make sure that your servers are secure? Maybe you are being hacked every night, does your company have the means to check if there has been a security breach?

- Do you follow/apply the security patches for the OS you are using on the server and all the software you are using on the server?

- Do you have regular offline backups? What would happen if there is a fire in your offices?

These are some of the reasons to go for a cloud solution, especially when you are not a software company (hence you don't have many people who have the knowledge for setting up/maintaining such stuff) or when you don't have the resources to hire dedicated sysadmins.

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> Is your company mainly a software company?

Mostly yes. We obviously have sales, marketing, etc. as well.

> - How much time do you spend on a week on maintaining your servers?

I don't do devops. There is a team of people that works full-time on IT infrastructure. No idea how time they spend. Gitlab and Zulip servers are updated every couple of weeks. No idea how much time these cost.

> - How do you make sure that your servers are secure? Maybe you are being hacked every night, does your company have the means to check if there has been a security breach?

There is a team of people that work on cybersecurity monitoring. No idea what they do. Normal IT people just make sure that everyone's computer is encrypted, setting up people's credentials, etc.

> Do you follow/apply the security patches for the OS you are using on the server and all the software you are using on the server?

I don't do anything, somebody does this for me.

> Do you have regular offline backups? What would happen if there is a fire in your offices?

We have multiple locations and the backups are replicated across our own locations.

Thanks for the answers. The reason I asked these questions was because your previous reply started with "And doing this is so simple.". But having full-time teams of devops, cybersecurity and IT is not so simple or cheap after all.

SAAS it's increasingly requiring security experts in house anyway. Yes the cloud providers can help, but they may also be an unknown liability.

Obviously we're not all going to build our own CPUs from sand at a local beach. So there is a balance between DIY and vetted suppliers

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