The SharePoint Decision: Do We Choose Cloud or On-Premises?

In April 2011, Microsoft launched Office 365 – a comprehensive set of Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions that allow any organization to obtain hosted, cloud-based access to Exchange, Lync, Office Web Applications – and SharePoint Online.

All offer guaranteed uptime, fault tolerance, contractual service levels, and clear, predictable pricing.

How Do You Choose Between Cloud and On-Premises?

Many organizations start by moving email to the cloud.

Few organizations have highly customized Exchange email environments. For many, it’s a no-brainer to migrate existing mailboxes to a hosted version of Exchange, because it simplifies the level of infrastructure support for fault tolerance, recovery, web access, border security, and archiving.

And, the services and configuration used for Exchange service on premises are usually the same among different firms. It’s email.

SharePoint is different. Imagine a world where on-premises SharePoint never existed. (Imagine!) Now, suppose that in a world of Google Docs, Yahoo Mail, and Box.Net, Microsoft had announced a new service that allowed the following:

People would be blown away by the depth of functionality Microsoft made available in the cloud. I mean it – there would be wild celebrations and stampedes in the street!

But that’s not the perception of Office 365-based SharePoint. Instead, there’s a lot of needless focus on “what’s left out.” (SharePoint Online does lack a few features relative to on-premises SharePoint.)

Questions Help Determine Answers

Determining whether to use SharePoint Online instead of on-premises SharePoint can be complicated. Here’s a simple set of questions to help determine if SharePoint Online makes sense (see below). For each question, give yourself points as noted in the box.

Add up your scores, and see how you match up:

32:  You are probably already on SharePoint Online or Office 365. Enjoy the view from your cloud!

24-31: You are a strong candidate for SharePoint Online. Study carefully and understand some of the functional tradeoffs of the platform. SharePoint Online doesn’t support the following:

10-23:  You are somewhere in between. Understanding the platform advantages and tradeoffs is essential to figuring out your cloud strategy. Odds are good that you may use a hybrid approach in which parts of your SharePoint world remain on premises, with other aspects living on Office 365.

0-9:  If SharePoint is already living in your data center, it’s probably in the right place.

It’s also important to remember that a cloud vision is almost always a future-looking strategy. Since the cloud is uniformly available, it’s easier to deliver content to users with less respect for their immediate location or device (PCs, tablets, smartphones).

Similarly, although Office 365 and SharePoint Online lack features relative to on-premises SharePoint, this isn't expected to be a permanent situation. If we project forward through the next release of SharePoint, we can forecast a time when the on-premises and cloud versions of SharePoint provide nearly identical functions.

What will make it really interesting comes after that – when new features start showing up in the cloud before they are bundled into the next major SharePoint on-premises release. A cloud-hosted SharePoint offering with better functions and simplified ease of operation will be a hard combination to deny for many current on-premises users.

Chris McNulty is a strategic product manager for SharePoint Solutions at Quest Software, where his responsibilities include the strategic product direction for Quest’s SharePoint solutions. Chris is a MCTS, MCSE, and a member of the Microsoft Solutions Advocate and MVTSP programs. A frequent speaker at events around the U.S., Chris is the author of the “SharePoint 2010 Consultant’s Handbook – Managed Metadata Service,” and blogs at chrismcnulty.net and SharePointforAll.com. You can also find the cloud vs. on-prem assessment posted on Quest’s SharePoint community.