Cloud or not cloud? What your accountant is not telling you

“We’ll go with the cloud solution, it’s simpler.” We hear that ten times a month in meetings. It is rarely wrong. But it hides three questions a sharp accountant would ask before you sign.

Question 1: what happens when your Internet goes down?

For 80% of the SMEs we meet, the honest answer is: “we lose half the day”. Cloud tools, mail, document access, ERP — everything goes through the Internet pipe.

A four-hour carrier outage happens. Twice in 2025 at firms we follow. For eight people stopped, that is half a day lost — and the bill runs into the thousands, every incident.

A local solution — on a workstation, a server, or both — keeps running. You read your documents, work your summaries, prep your meetings. The Internet comes back when it comes back.

Question 2: who pays to store your data for the next 10 years?

Cloud pricing looks nice on the first invoice. Less nice on the tenth.

Real case: a law firm storing 250 GB of documents (not much) with a local cloud vendor. Initial cost advertised: a few tens per month.

Three years later, after two price hikes (small but real), a mandatory plan change to keep a feature, and three extra users for growth, the bill had more than quadrupled (+337%).

Compare that to a Mac mini, an AroBox sized on quote, and controlled tariff dependency — without US SaaS price hikes imposed on you.

Question 3: what is your exit strategy?

Nobody asks this. It is by far the most important.

A cloud vendor can, overnight:

• Raise prices (regular — Microsoft, Google, Adobe all did)
• Change terms (OpenAI in 2024 on data collection)
• Freeze your account on automated reports (several Google Drive accounts deleted in 2023 with no notice)
• Shut down (several European SaaS vendors between 2022 and 2025)

In all these scenarios, the question is not “will it happen?”, it is “what do I do when it happens?”.

With a solution where your documents and index stay on a box at your premises — like AroBox — the answer is: “I have the machine, I have the data, I have the docs, and we contracted continuity”. With cloud, the honest answer is often: “I hope exports work”.

An honest reading grid

	Cloud SaaS	On-premise
Initial setup	almost zero	a workstation + a box
Annual cost after 3 years	who knows	predictable
Offline availability	0%	100%
Confidentiality	depends on contract	total
Vendor lock-in	high	lower (data with you)
Updates	imposed	chosen
Physical maintenance	0	a little

Both models have their place. Cloud remains the best answer for 70% of non-strategic tools (office suite, calendars, messaging). On-premise is mandatory for the 30% that touch your most sensitive data.

And generative AI falls squarely in that 30%.

Let’s talk — we look at your case and tell you honestly whether it makes sense for you.