Office 365 is making steady progress in capturing small and medium business market segments with its software-as-a-service office suite and especially with cloud based version of SharePoint 2010. Adoption in larger enterprises is much slower however. For lot of organizations Office 365 is an excellent entry point into Cloud services that allows reduction of operational costs, physical storage requirements, and more optimal use of support resources. This all translates into reduction of total cost of ownership, in addition to elimination of more intangible headaches and risks like software updates or upgrades. However, quite a few organizations still have concerns related to security, reliability, ownership of data, privacy, or lack of knowledge what to do with existing on-site installations and investments. Honestly speaking, with regards to security or reliability – for most of organizations, cloud services are usually better in those areas than in-house operations. Cloud companies like Amazon, Microsoft or Rackspace have whole teams dedicated to these subjects, monitoring servers 24/7. Regarding ownership of the data, this shouldn’t be an issue either, since the data is not shared, even in multitenant environment (Microsoft offers two models – multitenant and dedicated, the latter might be an option for those who are obsessed with information protection). Deciding what to do with existing SharePoint installations, and the privacy – are valid concerns. In some countries (Canada is one of them, and so is European Union), passing information that includes personal data of users or clients across country borders, is illegal. Recently Microsoft announced cloud solution that would secure and limit the boundaries of the information transfer specifically to address government requirements, but so far this is limited only to the US. Also, the Microsoft SharePoint offering that is part of Office 365 suite, does not provide all the features that on-site installations have. Some of them:
- Lack of FAST search solution
- Lack of integration with Microsoft Information Rights Management
- Lack of ability to index external databases from SharePoint search
- Lack of Performance Point Services
- Lack of support for external lists
So, for organizations that need more sophisticated configurations, this might not be the best option – at least for now.
But there is however another possibility – companies that really want to move into cloud, could try hybrid solutions. Assuming that such organizations have good information architecture and defined business processes, they could partition data and processes in such way that critical information is handled by in-house installations, and the rest is stored and processed using cloud solution. The integration of the data might require building a mash-up portals for the end users, so it would require some good thinking before implementation, and solid governance in place. It is important however to understand limitations of such solution – for example – federated search based on cloud and on-premises data will not work. Key success factor for such implementation would be a solid understanding of the business requirements, and alignment with overall long term goals of the organization. There are however quite a few benefits that cloud solutions bring and Microsoft is working on closing some of the gaps.
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