When a UK business outgrows scattered files on laptops and a shared Dropbox folder, the same fork in the road appears: rent space in the cloud, or buy a NAS box that lives in your own office. Both store files; that is where the similarity ends. One is a monthly bill and someone else's problem; the other is an upfront purchase and yours to look after. Here is how to choose without overpaying or boxing yourself in.
The two options in one minute
Cloud storage means your files live in a provider's data centre - think OneDrive and SharePoint, Google Drive, Dropbox Business or a service like Amazon S3. You pay per user or per terabyte, every month, and reach it over the internet from anywhere.
A NAS - Network Attached Storage - is a small appliance with several hard drives that sits in your office and plugs into your network. Staff on-site reach it at full local-network speed; staff off-site reach it over the internet if you set that up. You buy it once, and you own the box, the drives and the responsibility.
Where your money actually goes
This is the decision most owners get wrong, because the two models hide their costs in different places. Cloud is pure operating cost: a predictable monthly figure that scales with how much you store and how many people use it, with no hardware to buy and nothing to maintain. It looks cheap at small sizes and grows steadily as you do.
A NAS is mostly upfront capital - the appliance and drives - plus modest running costs: electricity, the occasional replacement drive, and your time (or your IT partner's) keeping it healthy. For large, fairly static volumes of data that several people hammer all day on-site, a NAS is often dramatically cheaper over three to five years. For small or unpredictable needs, the cloud usually wins.
- •Cloud: low to enter, no hardware, scales smoothly, but the monthly bill never stops and grows with your data.
- •NAS: higher day-one cost, cheaper per terabyte at scale, but you carry the maintenance, backups and eventual replacement.
- •The crossover point is real: model both over five years, not five months, before deciding.
Speed, access and the internet line in the middle
If your team works in one office shifting big files - design, video, CAD, large datasets - a NAS is hard to beat, because it talks to staff over the local network at speeds the internet cannot match. Opening a 2 GB file from a NAS down the corridor is instant; pulling it from the cloud depends entirely on your business broadband, and uploads are usually far slower than downloads.
Cloud storage wins decisively the moment your people are spread out - home workers, multiple sites, staff on the road. Everyone gets the same files with no VPN gymnastics, and the provider handles the awkward problem of reaching your data from anywhere. A NAS can do remote access too, but you are then maintaining and securing that yourself.
Backup, resilience and the question everyone forgets
Here is the trap. A NAS with several drives feels safe because if one drive dies, the others carry on - that is RAID. But RAID is not a backup: it protects against a drive failing, not against fire, theft, ransomware, or someone deleting the wrong folder. A NAS still needs its own backup, ideally off-site, which is a cost and a chore people routinely skip. We spell this out in why RAID is not a backup.
Cloud storage feels safer here, and often is, because the provider replicates your data across their infrastructure. But - and this catches firms out - that protects the provider's hardware, not you from your own mistakes or an attacker. Cloud files still need a separate backup, which is exactly why we wrote how to back up business data and why even Microsoft 365 needs one. Whichever you pick, the 3-2-1 rule still applies.
So which should you buy?
There is rarely one right answer, and plenty of UK firms sensibly run both: a NAS for the big, fast, on-site working files, and cloud for collaboration, remote access and the off-site copy. Match the tool to how your people actually work.
Lean cloud if your team is distributed, your storage needs are modest or unpredictable, you have no appetite to maintain hardware, or you are already deep in Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. Lean NAS if you have a busy office moving large files, large and fairly steady data volumes, a decent internet line for the off-site backup, and someone to look after it. If you are weighing the bigger on-premises-versus-cloud question for whole systems, our cloud vs on-prem TCO analysis goes deeper, and public, private and hybrid cloud explained covers the in-between.