In short
Cloud computing means drawing computing power, storage and applications over the network instead of running your own servers. You pay for use rather than hardware, and the provider handles operations and maintenance. The gain is not always price — it is the shift of investment and responsibility.
The three tiers, without jargon
Infrastructure: you rent a server and install everything yourself. Platform: you get the environment and bring only your application. Software: you use a finished product in a browser — that is SaaS, and it is where most SMEs already are without using the word.
The tiers differ in how much you are responsible for. Going up, the effort falls and the dependency rises.
Where the sums do not work
With steady, predictable load, owned hardware is often cheaper across five years. Cloud wins where load fluctuates or growth cannot be planned — you pay for the peak instead of keeping capacity for it.
The line that regularly goes missing from comparisons is outbound data transfer. Uploading is usually free, downloading is not — and that bill arrives exactly when you change provider.
Swiss requirements
For most SMEs server location is not an obligation but a documentation question: the revised Data Protection Act requires disclosure abroad to be named and safeguarded.
It tightens with sensitive data and in regulated sectors. There, which data centre applies and under which law stops being a formality — and Swiss data centres become a real argument rather than a sales line.
How we handle it
We do not move everything to the cloud because it is called cloud. We work out per system what operating it costs today — including the working hours nobody invoices — and decide from there.
How we work: backup and cloud and managed IT.
Related terms
A term in your quote that nobody explained?
In a strategy call we translate the offer in front of you — even when it did not come from us.