[nickpsecurity]

The alternative doesn't take into account:

- The time and money it takes to find and evaluate providers like Heroku

- The risk (and therefore potential cost) if the SaaS solution doesn't handle your needs as advertised

- Unknown costs that crop up both in paying the provider and handling stuff outside the provider.

- Overhead spent managing cloud applications

- Potential that local Internet or cloud startup experiences downtime.

There's a reason dedicated IT people exist and have been successful, and these are just a few of them.