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SharePoint Cloud vs Local OnPremise

Target audience: Business decision makers When we are looking for a business class document management and collaboration application, SharePoint is an obvious choice. For large and complex project management where multiple teams are involved, SharePoint becomes necessary tool. It promotes team management and collaboration. With SharePoint, employees can securely share their work, ideas and documents via easy to access web-based platform. What makes it more useful is that it’s flexible and customizable. Definitely SharePoint is the right solution for your collaboration and document management needs. The next question is what’s the best SharePoint solution for you – local on-premise or hosted on the cloud SharePoint? How to find the right SharePoint solution? When you are looking for a business class document management and collaboration application, SharePoint is an obvious choice. For deploying locally on-Premise SharePoint solution you need to have efficient technical resources and no budget constraints. In case you don’t have expert and certified IT resources and sufficient budget, it would be better to consider Hosted SharePoint solutions. Hosted SharePoint 2010 or the latest one- Hosted SharePoint 2013 could be deployed immediately at affordable monthly subscription fees. Along with predictable costs, Hosted SharePoint 2010 is reliable, secure and scalable. Hence if you are a growing business, it would be better for you to choose the cloud based SharePoint which comes with scalability and predictable costing. There are no hidden fees and deployment pre-requisites with Hosted SharePoint as it is cloud based software. If you have a good IT team with extensive knowledge for SharePoint deployment and later technical support, it may be good to have local on-premise solution but for companies with no relevant IT expertise, Hosted SharePoint is a boon as it comes with free 24X7 technical support and automatic updates. Hence no IT resources are required from your end for deploying and managing Hosted SharePoint. Also Hosted SharePoint provides frees your existing IT team from installations, upgrades, fixing performance and network issues. It helps them to focus on their development and business process improvement stuff. If you are planning to use dedicated architecture for SharePoint deployment, you get completely customized application. It’s a very flexible solution and you need to pay for the space as well as the resources you have chosen. Dedicated deployment is often associated with a set up cost too. The other model is hybrid architecture. It allows organizations to use cloud but also allow them to keep more sensitive data in-house. Though this architecture seems convincing from security point of view but it is complex and comparatively difficult to implement. It requires two separate environments – one over cloud and another in-house for critical data. Multi-tenant architecture for deploying SharePoint is the lowest cost option as resources are shared between customer organizations. Because of this sharing, the customization is quite difficult to achieve in multi-tenant architecture as compared to dedicated architecture. To summarize, SharePoint capabilities are excellent for your organizational growth whether you deploy on-premises or over cloud. It is certainly one of the best applications for project and document management and collaborating with multiple teams. However you should consider above mentioned factors – cost, IT resources and scalability for choosing the right solution for you. Hosted SharePoint is very comfortable when you want to access data while travelling or from multiple mobile devices or tablets.

Sergey Gimplin