Infrastructure That Scales With a Short Season
Cloud solutions that lower costs, back up your data, and flex with demand, instead of a fixed-cost server room that sits half-idle most of the year.
How This Works
As a partner with OTG Consulting, I consult on what actually fits your business and connect you with the provider that delivers it. OTG is a consultancy that presents the services of other providers rather than delivering them itself.
The capabilities described on this page are delivered and supported by the service provider you select, not by Paul Petro IO or OTG Consulting. My role is helping you choose well and staying reachable after the contract is signed.
I once took a two-year project backlog down to four months, and almost none of that came from buying more capacity. It came from removing the waiting.
Cloud gets sold on elasticity, and the elasticity is genuinely real, but the savings only show up if somebody is actually resizing things when the season turns. I have seen plenty of migrations that moved a fixed-cost server room into a fixed-cost cloud bill and got called modernization. So when I help you evaluate this, the question I put to a provider is who owns the monthly review of what you are running and what happens if that review does not get done. Without an answer, the meter simply keeps climbing.
Paul Petro · U.S. Marine Corps veteran, 25+ years in telecom and IT
Why Cloud Beats a Fixed-Cost Buildout
Resource Pooling
Access the computing power you need, on a pay-as-you-go basis, instead of buying for peak capacity year-round.
On-Demand Self-Service
Add resources when you need them, without waiting on procurement or staffing.
Rapid Elasticity
Scale up for the winter holidays, scale back down in the spring, and stop paying year-round for capacity you use for six weeks.
Measured Services
Usage is tracked and billed for what you actually use, so costs match reality.
Broad Network Access
Your team connects from any device with internet, useful for staff who split time between locations.
Colocation, Public Cloud, Backup, and Storage
Colocation
Access to carrier-neutral data center facilities without building your own.
Public Cloud
AWS and Azure setups optimized for cost, not just capability.
Backup & Disaster Recovery
Sized to your business, from a single terabyte to multi-terabyte operations. Matters more on an island than most places.
Cloud Storage & Virtual Servers
Object, file, and block storage, plus virtual servers across Linux, Windows, SQL Server, and more.
Questions I Get About Cloud
Does it matter that the data center is on the mainland?
For most business applications, no. For a few, yes, and it is worth knowing which category you are in before you migrate. Traffic from Oahu to mainland data centers crosses submarine cable, which adds round-trip delay you cannot engineer away. Email, file storage, accounting, and booking systems are unaffected in any way a person notices. Anything chatty and latency-sensitive, or a point-of-sale that must complete a transaction while a guest waits at the counter, deserves testing before you commit. I would rather find that out during evaluation than after the cutover.
If cloud scales down, why did our bill go up after migrating?
Because scaling down is a decision somebody has to make, not something that happens on its own. I have seen plenty of migrations that moved a fixed-cost server room into a fixed-cost cloud bill and got called modernization. The savings are real but they are conditional. Somebody has to review what you are running each month and turn off what you are not using. When I evaluate a provider I ask who owns that review by name, because if the answer is vague the meter simply keeps climbing.
What should our backup plan look like given where we are?
It should assume the island itself can be affected, which is a different starting point than most mainland templates use. Hurricane season runs June through November in the Central Pacific, and a plan where every copy of your data sits in the same building as your business is not a plan. At minimum I want a copy off-island, a documented restore procedure, and evidence that the restore has actually been tested. Backups that have never been restored are a belief, not a safeguard.
Do we still need anything on site?
Often yes, and a hybrid arrangement is usually more honest about how businesses here operate. Point-of-sale, door access, and anything that has to keep working when the internet drops all have good reasons to run locally. The useful question is not cloud or on-premise, it is which specific systems must survive an outage. Answer that first, and the split becomes obvious rather than ideological.
Is colocation worth considering instead?
Sometimes, particularly if you already own hardware that is not near end of life, or you have a system that genuinely needs to stay in the islands for latency or contractual reasons. Colocation gets you real power, cooling, and connectivity without running a server closet in a building that was never designed for one. I would rather see a business colocate equipment it already owns than replace working hardware to satisfy a migration plan that was written before anyone looked at what you have.
Get in Touch
Reach out directly, or grab a time on the calendar, whichever's easier.
- (720) 915-0003
- paul.petro@otgconsulting.net
- Serving Oahu, the Hawaiian Islands, and the mainland US
Book a Free Consultation
Pick a time that works for you, no back-and-forth, no forms to fill out.
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