Cloud or on-premise? What's right for your company

It's one of the first questions we get from companies evaluating Directa: where should the board's data live? The short answer: it depends on your company's size, regulatory framework and infrastructure capacity. The long answer follows.

The case for the cloud

For small and mid-size companies, cloud deployment is almost always the right answer. The reasons are practical: live in under a week, no investment in servers or dedicated IT teams, automatic updates, and a setup fee of just US$100.

The usual objection — "what about security?" — deserves a serious answer: in a well-built cloud deployment, data travels and is stored encrypted, access is role-controlled, and information is never used to train third-party models. For the vast majority of mid-size companies, this standard exceeds that of their own internal servers.

The case for on-premise

For large companies — in our definition, above US$5 million in annual sales — the equation changes. They tend to operate under stricter regulatory frameworks, handle board information with high market impact, and have their own IT and infrastructure teams. For them, on-premise deployment offers a guarantee no contract can match: the data never leaves the company's perimeter.

On-premise isn't distrust of the cloud: it's alignment with the risk policies a large board already has.

This deployment includes integration with internal systems (ERP, BI, document repositories), dedicated implementation support and an SLA. The US$5,000 setup fee reflects that implementation work: typically 2–4 weeks depending on existing infrastructure.

A simple rule for deciding

If your company has no in-house IT team and no regulatory requirement to keep data on your own infrastructure, choose cloud and start this week. If your board handles information whose leak would affect markets, regulators or ongoing negotiations — and you have the infrastructure to host it — on-premise is the defensible decision before any risk committee.

The monthly license per company is US$100 on the SMB plan and US$150 on Enterprise, in both cases with all agents, the directors' app and all users included. What changes is where your data lives.