Taking SharePoint from On-Premises to Online – When, Why and What to Move
May 20, 2013
SharePoint is no exception to this. If you currently run SharePoint in your datacenters, you will face the same question sooner or later: do you stay on-premises, or do you move to the cloud? Here are some thoughts and considerations from a SharePoint admin’s point of view:
- Upgrade to the latest SharePoint version. Even if you are on the latest and greatest already, new versions will come out eventually and will require the upgrade. However, most organizations relying on SharePoint still have versions 2010, or even 2007 and earlier. With the release of SharePoint 2013, Microsoft did not provide an in-place upgrade path. This means the move to the new version would inevitably require new hardware, careful planning, testing and piloting, etc. ─ essentially, this is a project that requires time, money and effort. For many companies, this is the time to review the current infrastructure and consider alternative options that can possibly increase reliability and/or reduce the cost of ownership.
- Mergers and acquisitions. In this fast changing world, chances are your IT infrastructure will need to be merged with someone else’s infrastructure in the next few years, and it is not difficult to imagine that this other infrastructure may be running in a cloud. Even if it’s not, the newly combined IT organization will have a chance to review the overall approach and design of the new applications’ architecture, based on the business needs and technologies available today.
- The rest of the IT infrastructure is moving to the cloud. Increasingly, we hear from SharePoint admins that they’re evaluating Office 365 SharePoint Online because their company had made a decision to leverage Exchange and Lync Online. This is not surprising since email, IM and voice communications are typically at the core of any business. Although SharePoint might be business-critical for some organizations, more often it’s not the main driver for the “go/no go” cloud decision.
Cloud options for SharePoint
There are different cloud offers that can be part of your SharePoint deployment. You can consider the following options:
- Microsoft Office 365 SharePoint Online http://office.microsoft.com/. You can get SharePoint Online as a separate service or as a part of your Office 365 subscription. In this case, Microsoft takes care of all the backend infrastructure, security, operational monitoring, backups, etc. However, Microsoft also sets the rules about what users and admins can and cannot do in SharePoint Online. Different subscription plans allow for different feature sets and levels of flexibility.
- Hosted SharePoint is another option offered by various Microsoft partners – Solution Providers (MSPs). Generally, MSPs offer more options than are available with Office 365, and each tries to find unique differentiator features to attract customers.
- Finally, you can keep complete control of the application but leverage the cloud to provide a platform or infrastructure service such as Windows Azure. In this case, you may be using the cloud for hosting virtual machines running SharePoint, or maybe leveraging the cloud storage while still running the application servers on-premises.
Costs and benefits
Assume you face a major change to the SharePoint deployment and consider the cloud as one of the possible options. You already know the possible cloud alternatives you could use. Now, what are the factors that influence the decision?
First of all, you should understand this is not purely an IT decision. You will need input from the business and security stakeholders. Review how SharePoint is being used today: are there any business process dependencies, restricted content, compliance-driven requirements, etc.? Watch out for customizations and integration with external systems, such as line-of-business applications. Collect this information together with the requirements and concerns from stakeholders, and then start the evaluation.
For the most part, pros and cons will be the same for SharePoint as they are for any other application. CloudCow previously has published a good summary of these by Tri Nguyen, “Cloud, Control or Both.” However, SharePoint has specifics that you should consider in addition to what Nguyen has discussed:
- Data migration costs ─ Migration can be a serious undertaking for many SharePoint deployments. For example, Office 365 does not really provide any tools to simplify the move – Microsoft relies on partners (both services and software vendors). MSPs may or may not charge for helping with the migration. Review the options and consider the costs of the move versus the value and savings that you get. Does it make sense to migrate all of your SharePoint data? Should you plan for an interim period when you start new projects in the cloud, but let the on-premises SharePoint sites phase out gradually?
- Authentication ─ How will your users authenticate in the online SharePoint? Will you rely on Microsoft Online accounts to access Office 365 services, or do you need to have single sign-on for both the internal network and SharePoint in the cloud? Federation is required to enable single sign-on, so make sure you count the efforts and cost of Active Directory Federation Services deployment, including at least two ADFS servers for fault tolerance, etc.
- Customizations ─ You obviously have all the control and flexibility you need with your on-premises SharePoint deployment. What customizations do you use? Does the hosting provider you’re considering allow for this type of customization? Are there other alternatives you could use to have the same functionality in the new environment, and what would be the cost of re-developing the functionality? For example, farm-wide solutions are not allowed in Office 365, but you may be able to get some of the previously customized functions with out-of-the-box, or with the new SharePoint applications model.
- Integration with other applications and data warehouses ─ Do you use your SharePoint to aggregate data, provide BI on top of, or to access, any other applications? Will you need the same level of access in your cloud deployment? Again, all of that will influence the associated efforts and costs. For example, Business Connectivity Services (BCS) are only available with more expensive Office 365 Enterprise E3 and E4 plans. In addition, security considerations may make the integration more complicated.
- Feature set provided by the hosting provider ─ Microsoft Office 365 allows you to pick from a range of subscription plans with different costs and functionalities. Different MSPs may have different approaches to this, as well. Consider the requirements you have collected and look for the most cost-effective option available. For a complete list of SharePoint features available with Office 365 plans, and SharePoint on-premises versions, refer to the SharePoint Online Service Description on TechNet.
Conclusion
Not surprisingly, I will agree with Nguyen’s conclusion in the article, “Cloud, Control or Both,” which I referred to earlier. Many companies will find reasons why 100 percent dedication to the cloud will probably not work. The good news is that this does not have to be an “all or nothing” decision. Nothing prevents you from taking smaller steps and figuring out use cases and workloads that can be moved to the cloud over time.
At the end of the day, what really matters is the business continuity and cost efficiency of the infrastructure that supports it. The cloud offers no silver bullet for solving all IT problems. It is just another instrument in your set of tools. Educate yourself about the available options, and use them where applicable and where they add the most value.
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About the Author
Ilia Sotnikov is a product manager for Microsoft SharePoint reporting, management and governance products at Dell Software. Over the last 12 years, Ilia has held various positions, from support escalation engineer to development program manager. Ilia also has worked on various migration and management products for enterprise deployments of Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft SharePoint products and technologies.