Should We Put SharePoint In the Cloud? – Part 1 of 7

Over the past several years, I’ve seen a number of companies of all sizes and shapes look at their options for managing SharePoint.  The recent release of SharePoint 2010 means a lot of organizations are at a crossroads.  They need to decide if they are going to upgrade to the latest and greatest version of the technology, of course, but they also need to decide if the way they’ve managed SharePoint in the past will continue to be the best approach in the future.

Now, to be clear on this, I’m not talking about how they set up their document libraries, and how they arrange their workflows, although those are obviously important pieces of the overall SharePoint puzzle.

What I’m offering here is a process by which an organization can go about the process and the work of determining the best approach to managing SharePoint as the strategic enterprise application that it is.

You don’t need to read this whole series or even this one post to understand that I am clearly in favor of outsourcing the hosting and management of SharePoint to a qualified provider, which I feel is the right decision for many if not most organizations and in many if not most situations. 

What I’ve attempted to create here is a sort of how-to playbook for making the right decision for your organization.   And despite my stated bias, it is entirely possible that after thinking through this process that you may determine that your organization may not be a good fit for SharePoint as a cloud-based managed service.  If so, more power to you, but please drop me a note to let me know the factors on which you based your decision.  This kind of feedback will be invaluable to other readers and to myself and other advocates of outsourced hosting and management for SharePoint.

This 7-part series will consist of the following:

Part 1 – Should we host on-premises or with a provider? (Can we do both?)

Part 2 - Do we need a dedicated solution, or is multi-tenant going to work for our needs?

Part 3 - If we make the leap, what do we lose?  What do we gain?

Part 4 - What questions should we be asking potential providers?

Part 5 - Who are the leading providers?

Part 6 - How do we select the right provider for our unique needs?

Part 7 - How do we make the business case internally?

Enjoy!

 

Part 1 – Should we host on-premises or with a provider?  (Can we do both?)

The first thing you need to consider is whether yours is the type of organization that should be doing everything internally, or whether you should be considering high quality providers.  Consider whether you fall into the category of organizations that can do high quality hosting on-premises.

Why might you host and manage on-premises?

You have only a single location (i.e., LAN connectivity only) and limited or no WFH

In other words, you don’t have complex needs for connectivity to SharePoint.  A simple installation in your headquarters would basically satisfy all of your users, and given them LAN speed performance.  Lucky you!

You already have sophisticated, mature, strategically located data center assets that you want to continue to invest in

It’s not enough that you have some servers in a room somewhere.  Over time, SharePoint is going to hold your company’s most important intellectual property.  Take an honest look at your data center operations, and the level of focus and resources they are likely to receive in the future, in order to continue to grow and stay current over time.

You already have a well-rounded SharePoint team in-house (technical, admin, information architect, helpdesk, et al.)

If you can barely managed SharePoint as it is, then seriously consider whether this situation is likely to improve.  It’s hard to leverage SharePoint effectively to transform your business if it constantly gets starved and neglected.

For SharePoint and related infrastructure, you have a 99.9% uptime Service Level Agreement with IT and they are meeting it consistently

If you have a top quality data center operations team who is delivering outstanding service levels, good for you!   If not, you need to consider how important SharePoint is, and whether or not you have the peace of mind that your solution is being well taken care of.

You have an effective SOP for Change Management that provides auditability of notable changes to your SharePoint environment

The only thing worse than numerous people making changes without proper documentation is one person making all the changes without proper documentation, and then quitting.  If SharePoint is still “in the wild” and it not supported by clear governance policies and procedures, you are vulnerable to an array of potential problems and breakdowns.  Outsourcing the hosting and management of SharePoint is going to give you some very clear distinctions in responsibility that give you the separation of duties that will meet even the toughest compliance requirements. 

“We need to manage all of our stuff ourselves”

Really?  Do you?   Or is this just habit talking?  If you legitimately do have such stringent requirements (top secret content, etc.) that you simply can not entrust SharePoint to an external provider, then I’m not going to argue with you.  What I will say is don’t count out the idea of a strategic partner even under this circumstance.  There are numerous providers of services who can assist with SharePoint expertise for even specialized needs like yours.

Why might you host and manage with a provider?

You have numerous locations in multiple regions (largely WAN or Internet connectivity) and/or many WFH

If most of your users are not connecting over the LAN anyway, then hosting outside of your own data center is not necessarily going to present a significant change in performance of the network.

You lack sophisticated, mature, modern data center assets that are strategically located with your users

Emphasis on “sophisticated, mature, modern.”  Everyone has servers and infrastructure on some level, but not everyone has the systems and subsystems in place that enable the superior level of reliability, high availability, and disaster recovery capabilities that leading providers can offer.

SharePoint technology and your SharePoint content are not well-understood by those currently tasked with supporting it

This is a very common problem these days, as so many organizations have recognized the need for SharePoint, but have neither the time nor the people to master it themselves.

You wish to have a well-rounded SharePoint team at your  disposal, but don’t have time or resources to recruit, hire, train and retain scarce SharePoint expertise

It’s great to have a SharePoint guru in house, but if you are betting your organization’s intellectual property and security posture on a single individual, or even a small group of individuals, you may be putting your organization at unnecessary risk.  You could grow your SharePoint management team appropriately, but can you do this in time and cost-effectively enough to meet your needs?  Often, this is more challenging than organizations initially expect.

By the way, if you are the “SharePoint Guy (or Gal)” for your organization, you don’t have to feel threatened by the prospect of hosting and managing SharePoint externally.  Chances are, you as much as anyone, will stand to benefit by becoming a strategic liaison between the business and the provider, rather than swamped with a mind-numbing laundry list of small tasks to get done for end users.

Internal IT is unable to meet your uptime and performance SLA requirements consistently

If uptime is critical to important business processes, then you can’t afford outages.  It is typically much easier to achieve high SLAs with a provider, who is contractually bound to achieve the SLA or face penalties that cut into their profits.

Currently Change Management is inadequate or non-existent

It is very quick, easy and convenient to go into the Central Administration interface and make changes.  So, as you might guess, this is a key area where problems are likely to be caused.  If an admin goes in and reconfigures something that causes a problem, without good documentation of changes, you may waste a lot of time trying to figure out what exactly caused the problem.  Any quality provider will have an effective change management program in place to track such changes, in order to facilitate root cause analysis when things go wrong.

“We don’t want to be in the hosting business.”

As many, many companies have learned the hard way, building out sophisticated, mature, modern data center facilities, and then doing it again to achieve geographic redundancy is an enormous cost, and is something better left to specialists in the hosting business, who can balance costs over their large customer base.

Why might you do both?

You want to manage certain highly sensitive content in a very particular way, but other content doesn’t have such strict requirements (works in either direction!)

This is an interesting one.  In some cases, it is the sensitive information that you want to keep on-premises.  On the other hand, if your organization’s on-premise environment doesn’t include effective layered security infrastructure, you may be better off putting the sensitive stuff with a provider who can lock it down more tightly and serve it back to your users over secured connections.  Then again, perhaps the opposite makes more sense.  The leading providers can work with you to craft a solution that meets your compliance and security requirements.

You want LAN users to be able to access certain content over the high speed network, but remote and WFH users just need to access it over the Internet with a VPN connection

The work force has become increasingly mobile over the past decade with a sharp spike in the last few years as the economy has made office space an expense many businesses have tried to minimize.  Workers are at home, on the road, in India and China, there are branch offices in the E.U…  Using a server at your HQ in the U.S. no longer guarantees that network performance will be great for your users.  Depending on how your business runs, it may make better sense to put content into the cloud where it can be delivered with higher performance to your remote users, than to keep it on-premises.

SharePoint technology and/or your SharePoint content are not well-understood by those tasked with supporting it. You need knowledgeable people minding your most important stuff

A trend that seems to be reversing lately has been that with the advent of MOSS 2007 in particular, companies liked what they were hearing enough to dive into SharePoint, but then quickly began to realize they had not invested enough in training and staffing for the management of the SharePoint environment.  With SharePoint 2010, the diverse skillsets needed to effectively utilize all of the features the technology offers, has only grown.  Nearly all companies will benefit from enhancing what their own people can do with a leading provider of SharePoint services in a number of disciplines.

You only have time and resources to recruit, hire, train and retain SharePoint expertise for certain key functions

Again, SharePoint expertise remains scarce, and training one or two people will only get you so far.  Look at the Total Cost of Ownership of a well-managed SharePoint solution vs. a poorly managed one, and you’ll quickly see the value in teaming with a highly qualified team of consultants.

Internal IT is unable to meet your 99.9% SLA consistently for content that requires it, however some content doesn’t have such strict requirements

The sophistication of your internal IT operations organization is really the key here.  If they are well-staffed and well-funded

Governance/Change Management is inadequate or non-existent where it counts, yet isn’t a major concern for a large portion of your content.

Maybe you want your official records on-premises only, but your MySites and Team Collaboration sites hosted elsewhere.  Or, maybe it’s a variation on that configuration, depending on your particular needs and interests.

You have different needs for your intranet and extranet users, and want to provide different levels of support for each.

If the intranet goes down that might be frustrating, but if the extranet goes down, that could be humiliating for your business.  Maybe your extranet therefore requires more care and feeding.

You want to use SharePoint as both an internal collaboration system, but also as a web site CMS system. You do not want to host the web site.

Maybe you put the collaboration sites on-premises, but the CMS web site with a provider who can guarantee you the uptime and performance your users need.

“We are intrigued by the option of getting hosting and management from a provider, but want to ‘try it out’ first.”

Maybe you are willing to put some SharePoint content in the cloud, but first you want to prove out the viability of the provider solution.  In this case, it may make sense to put only some of your content into the cloud.

Stay tuned for…

Part 2 - Do we need a dedicated solution, or is multi-tenant going to work for our needs?