There was a time when this was true, but modern systems make everyone a potential cloud data-center. The price of storage is well below $100 per terabyte and building redundant, fault-tolerant and disaster proof systems are cheaper and easier to maintain than ever before.
Your office might be modest, but you look like another fat account at a large data-center or ASP. You might not think you’re worth the risk for a hacker, but if your data is in the same data-center with high profile clients, you just became a high-profile target. Hackers like to pull off one job and get millions of accounts or documents
In fact, if you look around you today, those big companies with those big proprietary systems did what you just did: Cut staff by 15% The only proprietary systems that will survive are the ones that have people so locked in, they can’t escape without spending huge sums of cash.
Depends. “Free” software isn’t “cost-free”. It’s “Free” like a Bird. You are going to spend some money on “Free” software, but usually less and it will only have compromises built by your own agenda. Best of all YOU OWN IT! This also means you can charge for it’s use without royalty or middle-man.