Oh O365, Where (and What) Art Thou?

A customer's CIO asked a question today about the difference between SharePoint On-Premise and SharePoint Online in O365; and more importantly "Whether  his organization's workload is ready to be moved to cloud". While I was answering these questions, the obvious question (that I was waiting for) raised it's ugly head: "Is Cloud ready for my organization?".
I have seen this exact conversation play out many a times in last few months. As organizations are introduced to the cloud, one or more of the following three questions invariably gets asked:

1. What's the difference/value, and does it matter for me?
2. Is my organization ready for the cloud? 
3. Is cloud ready for my organization?          

I try to answer these questions in this post by taking SharePoint as an example. 

Lets start with some simple definitions:

• Cloud: Generic term for SaaS, PaaS, IaaS. 
• IaaS: 
• Stands for "Infrastructure as a service." 
• You are renting an infrastructure piece from a vendor.
• Example: Virtual Machines, Hard Drives, High Performance Nodes, Bandwidth, Network Cables, etc.  
• Vendors: Microsoft (Azure), Google, Amazon, Rackspace, etc   
• PaaS: 
• Stands for "Platform as a service." 
• You are subscribing to a platform, that you use to build your own applications. This is analogous to writing code using .Net framework, except the platform is hosted by a vendor. 
• Example: Azure, Google Apps Engine, Amazon EC2. 
• SaaS: 
• Stands for "Software as a service." 
• You are renting a software access.
• Example: Hotmail, Gmail, O365, Salesforce.com, CRM Online, etc.

• SharePoint On Premise: Self- hosted version of SharePoint. This is the traditional mode of deploying SharePoint on your own hardware and (typically) in your own data center.  

• SharePoint Online: Microsoft hosted version of SharePoint. Essentially, you will buy a subscription from Microsoft, that will allow you to log into the SharePoint UI. All the typical IT functions (installation, patches, backup, keeping the lights on, etc) are handled by Microsoft. 
• Refer: SharePoint Online Overview

Note: SharePoint Online is one of the SaaS offerings from Microsoft. You also have the option to rent VM (Virtual Machines) from Windows Azure (Microsoft's IaaS and PaaS offering) or any other vendor; and install your own SharePoint. The capability of such an install will be similar to the On-Premise installation. For the simplicity of this post, I will stick to the comparison between SharePoint On-Premise and O365.  

On-Premise Vs O365!! 

I present the difference based on multiple factors. Organizations may want to give more weightage/priority to some factors compared to others based on their unique needs:

• Procurement and Setup Cost:
• On-Premise: You incur the cost to get the space, buy hardware, license software, etc. 
• SP Online: You buy an Office 365 (or SharePoint Online) plan from Microsoft.

• Maintenance Cost:
• On-Premise: You hire an IT team to keep the lights on and apply patches, etc. 
• SP Online: Microsoft handles all maintenance headaches. 

• Business Continuity:
• On-Premise: You need to plan for backup, disaster recovery, etc.  
• SP Online: Handled by design. MS makes multiple copies of every data by default supported by well defined SLAs.   

• Features Availability:
• On-Premise: Support for Enterprise level features. 
• SP Online: Limited availability of features. Microsoft is continuously adding to the list of features available online. 
• Refer:
• SharePoint feature availability across Office 365 plans
• SharePoint feature availability across SharePoint Online standalone plans
• SharePoint feature availability across on-premises solutions.

• Customization Needs:
• On-Premise: It's your software and hardware. You have full control over how you want to customize it (server side as well as client side)    
• SP Online: Severe limitation for  server side customization (it's a multi-tenant environment after all). Full support for client side customization. You can use the new (and cool) Office Apps model with REST based API for App Store. 
• Refer: Overview of apps for SharePoint    

• Information Security:
• On-Premise:  You are responsible.  
• SP Online: Microsoft follows (and is certified) various industry standards for security. They take this very seriously!!   

• Compliance:
• On-Premise: You are responsible.
• SP Online: Microsoft ensures compliance with certain industry standards and is verified by third party auditors.  

• Size of data (and need to scale up and/or down ): 
• On-Premise: You need to build the extra capacity to scale up and down by buying expensive storage devices. 
• SP Online: Easier to scale up/down. Available storage (and limitations) is based upon the plan that you purchase.      

   Of course, you also have the option to build a hybrid environment that capitalizes on best of both worlds, but I have excluded it out of this analysis for the sake of simplicity. 

  

Hope this helps!! 

Cheers. 

Piyush