“To be able to get that with such relatively modest changes to our business is astounding,” says co-owner and chief technology officer, David Heinemeier Hansson.
"I went: ‘Wait! What are we spending for a week of rentals?’ I could buy some really powerful computers just on one week’s worth of spending.”Although costs pushed Mr Heinemeier Hansson to act, other factors were also a concern.“I saw the distributed design erode as more and more companies gravitated essentially to three owners of computers,” he says, referring to the three leading cloud providers.The cloud was pitched, he says, as cheaper, easier, and faster.
Digital workspace company Citrix found that 94% of large US organisations it surveyed had worked on repatriating data or workloads from the cloud in the last three years. “A key factor in our decision was that we have highly proprietary R&D data and code that must remain strictly secure,” says Markus Schaal, managing director at the German firm.
In a colocation arrangement the client owns the IT hardware, but houses it with another firm, where it can be kept securely, at the right temperature and with power back-up.