Cloud Storage or an Office NAS: Which Should Your Company Choose?

A box in the office looks cheaper: buy it once and use it. The real cost shows up the moment a drive fails or the building loses power.

What the NAS price tag hides

On top of the device itself, add the drives and their scheduled replacement, a UPS, the administrator’s time for setup and maintenance, and a spare drive on the shelf — without one, a failure turns into days of waiting for a delivery.

Where a NAS is vulnerable

• Fire, flooding or theft destroy the data along with the device.
• A power outage in the building makes files unavailable to everyone.
• Remote access has to be set up yourself — and it often ends up exposed to the internet insecurely.
• If two drives in the array fail, the data is lost completely.

What cloud storage gives you

Your data lives in a data center with uninterruptible power, cooling and security. Access works from the office, from home and on business trips without a separate VPN setup. Permissions are managed centrally: a departing employee loses access in one step. Capacity changes on request, and you pay daily for the space you actually use.

When a NAS still makes sense

If you constantly work with very large files inside the local network — say, four people editing video from the same array — local network speed wins. A sensible compromise: working files on the NAS, and backups of that NAS in the cloud.

How to size it

Start with a smaller plan and scale up as you grow: with daily billing, there’s no point paying for unused space. There’s also a “custom size” plan billed per gigabyte.