--- title: Can Hardware and OpEx Work Together? description: As you know, one of the things that nScaled does a bit differently from other cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers is we implement a Hybrid architecture, with an nScaled Local Cloud Appliance installed on the customer’s LAN providing business continuity and local backup, plus the nScaled Remote Cloud Data Centers providing the scale-up / scale-out elastic capacity for backup, failover and test/dev. canonical_url: https://www.acronis.com/en/blog/posts/can-hardware-and-opex-work-together/ locale: en last_updated: 2026-10-27 --- [Acronis Blog](https://www.acronis.com/en/blog/) # Can Hardware and OpEx Work Together? As you know, one of the things that nScaled does a bit differently from other cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers is we implement a Hybrid architecture, with an nScaled Local Cloud Appliance installed on the customer’s LAN providing business continuity and local backup, plus the nScaled Remote Cloud Data Centers providing the scale-up / scale-out elastic capacity for backup, failover and test/dev. [![Image 2: Acronis Editorial Team](https://staticfiles.acronis.com/images/content/d85707ae91461544212d39836dc32b42.png)](https://www.acronis.com/en/blog/authors/acronis/ "Acronis Editorial Team") [Acronis Editorial Team](https://www.acronis.com/en/blog/authors/acronis/) 1 min read Last updated 26 January 2015 As you know, one of the things that nScaled does a bit differently from other cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers is we implement a Hybrid architecture, with an nScaled Local Cloud Appliance installed on the customer’s LAN providing business continuity and local backup, plus the nScaled Remote Cloud Data Centers providing the scale-up / scale-out elastic capacity for backup, failover and test/dev. We think it’s the right architecture for corporate IT shops that want safe, secure and flexible cloud infrastructure. But it brought up a challenge in our pricing. See, customers have come to assume (rightly) that cloud services are billed monthly and move off their capex budget and onto their opex. Sweet. But everyone assumes that appliances are paid for with capex. We sure did. To be honest, we didn’t realize we were messing with customers’ expectations when we priced our Local Cloud Appliance as upfront spend (capex) and the rest of our services as opex. But customers and our sales team saw the impedance mismatch, complained, and we saw the light pretty quickly! So we recently reset our appliance pricing so that it’s billed monthly, just like everything else. Now our customers have the 100% opex solution pricing they want, and our sales team has a nice simple story to tell prospective customers. [Cybersecurity](https://www.acronis.com/en/blog/tags/cybersecurity/) [Cyber protection](https://www.acronis.com/en/blog/tags/cyber-protection/) ## Written by ![Image 3: Acronis Editorial Team](https://staticfiles.acronis.com/images/content/d85707ae91461544212d39836dc32b42.png) Acronis Editorial Team Acronis is a global cyber protection company that provides natively integrated cybersecurity, data protection, and endpoint management for managed service providers (MSPs), small and medium businesses (SMBs), and enterprise IT departments. [Previous post](https://www.acronis.com/en/blog/posts/infrastructure-does-not-differentiate-us-any-way/) [“Infrastructure does not differentiate us in any way”](https://www.acronis.com/en/blog/posts/infrastructure-does-not-differentiate-us-any-way/) [Next post](https://www.acronis.com/en/blog/posts/backup-strategies-are-component-larger-disaster-recovery-strategy/) [Backup strategies are a component of a larger disaster recovery strategy](https://www.acronis.com/en/blog/posts/backup-strategies-are-component-larger-disaster-recovery-strategy/) About Acronis Acronis is a leader in AI-native cyber protection, unifying data protection, cybersecurity, IT operations and hybrid infrastructure to deliver business continuity, security and compliance with less cost and complexity. More than 21,000 service providers trust Acronis to protect over 750,000 businesses in 150 countries. Acronis is headquartered in Schaffhausen, Switzerland. [Add as a preferred source on Google](https://google.com/preferences/source?q=acronis.com) ## Related stories Want to learn more? Read the latest stories featuring this solution on our blog. 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