Bruce Kornfeld, Chief Product Officer at StorMagic, explores why rising costs and performance concerns are prompting smaller businesses to rethink their reliance on public cloud – and how hyperconverged infrastructure could offer an alternative.

As data usage grows, escalating cloud costs are prompting some edge and small/medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to bring their workloads back in-house. However, this isn’t the only issue that is driving many of these businesses to re-evaluate their cloud strategies.

Back in the day, pay-as-you-go public cloud services seemed like the ideal solution for enabling a wide range of computing resources. With minimal upfront hardware investment, hosting applications and data in the cloud eliminated any need for physical servers. It also made it easy for edge and SMBs to rapidly adopt new IT solutions and deploy additional storage capacity as needed.

Fast forward to 2025, however, and many edge and SMBs are striving to find the right balance between cost, control and flexibility. Determined to keep up the pace where digital transformation is concerned, the challenge they face now is how best to leverage cloud storage services and position themselves for success.

Option 1: Cloud only

While cloud offers scalability, the rapid scaling up of applications and storage on cloud platforms can prove costly for businesses using a pay-as-you-go model. Added to which, transferring large amounts of data to the cloud can also result in additional fees that further impact costs. Accurately predicting future data needs can prove challenging, making it difficult to plan for potential cost increases. As a result, edge and SMBs are often confronted by sudden spikes in their monthly cloud bills that put operational budgets at risk.

Alongside regaining control of their cloud costs, security and compliance issues are a growing concern for many. This is particularly an issue for organisations handling sensitive customer information such as personal, health or financial data that want to minimise the risk of data loss, breaches or have greater control over where data is stored.

Finally, edge businesses and SMBs need to be certain they can eliminate any data latency issues that will impact the performance of customer-facing applications or their business-critical operations. This can prove challenging when their cloud provider’s data centres are located some distance away.

Option 2: Hybrid cloud

For many edge businesses and SMBs, hybrid cloud offers a ‘best of both worlds’ alternative that delivers benefits on multiple fronts.

By using the cloud for non-sensitive applications and data storage and keeping sensitive or frequently accessed data on local servers, they can maintain full control over how and where their sensitive data is stored and accessed. Meanwhile, by bringing their sensitive data in-house, these businesses are able to apply controls that ensure that data stays safe, is compliant with industry-specific regulatory requirements, and has restrictions on who can access it.

The adoption of a hybrid approach ensures that edge and SMBs can take advantage of the scalability of the public cloud to respond to fast changing needs. Meanwhile, they are able to leverage the improved performance offered by the private cloud to minimise application latency and address specific performance needs.

This blended utilisation of public cloud and on-premises or private cloud storage solutions enables edge and SMBs to tailor flexible storage strategies and run workloads wherever it makes the most sense. However, managing and maintaining hybrid cloud environments can prove a complex technical proposition, especially when it comes to ensuring smooth and seamless data flows. Added to which, there are not many solutions for edge and SMBs that encompass both private and public cloud as well as data centre infrastructures.

Option 3: Using HCI storage

Offering the simplified cloud management and scalability that edge businesses and SMBs need, hyper converged infrastructure (HCI) eliminates the complexity and cost typically associated with transitioning to hybrid cloud.

By consolidating compute, storage and network resources into one system, HCI delivers the cost efficiencies that are important to these businesses. Plus, a single interface gives them centralised control over all infrastructure components and simplifies day-to-day management tasks.

Ideal for businesses that want to deploy workloads optimally based on cost, performance and compliance considerations, HCI supports the easy migration of workloads and offers seamless integration with a variety of different cloud models. This ensures edge and SMBs can future proof their infrastructure and ensure it keeps pace with evolving business requirements.

With HCI, applications can be run and data securely stored on-premises, with connections to the cloud or the data centre being delivered as and when needed. Used as part of a hybrid strategy, this enables edge and SMBs to run workloads across private and public clouds, while keeping data close to the computing resources that use it – a move that both minimises latency and boosts efficiency, while ensuring that data and resources can be securely allocated according to workload demands.

With built-in backup and recovery features that streamline operations, HCI also allows for the flexible and fast expansion of storage resources with minimal disruption. Businesses simply add storage nodes to address new high availability requirements as these arise. Added to which, features such as deduplication, compression and caching helps businesses maximise their storage efficiency. Plus, HCI can spread data across multiple nodes to aid redundancy and data security.

Overcoming cloud challenges with HCI

HCI solutions eliminate many of the complex administration tasks that can prove a stumbling block for edge businesses and SMBs that need to efficiently manage their IT infrastructure. It also delivers against their very specific data security and performance needs.

Used as part of a hybrid cloud strategy, HCI enables businesses to leverage hybrid cloud services with ease and adapt to changing needs fast. It also delivers improved performance by ensuring that data is stored close to the computing resources that use it, and by maximising resource utilisation based on workload demands.

For those that want to embrace a hybrid cloud strategy and deliver better performance for all, without sacrificing security and governance controls, HCI makes it easy to allocate resources dynamically to improve capacity, performance and protection without overprovisioning storage. They simply pay for the features they need, adding additional capabilities as their environment evolves.