On Site Servers

Advantages:

RIS opens a little faster
RIS access not dependent on internet access

Disadvantages:

Cost of initial hardware purchase
Cost of maintaining hardware
Not backed up across regions (note that the African servers are also not currently backed up across regions)
Reliance on local suppliers when server hardware dies (although this is minimized by our intelligent design)

We highly recommend the remote Blackbird Archive for all clients and the remote RIS server for all clients with reasonable connectivity to our servers in North America, Europe, Africa and Asia.