SysAdmin; OnPrem versus the Cloud

It used to be I hated the letters e and i. Everything in the 90s was eSomething or iSomething. Heck, one of the companies I worked for started with a lowercase i.

Now I hate the word Cloud. Everything is branded that way, whether it deserves it or not.

But while I hate the term and its marketing overuse, I am completely bought into the concept and the value proposition. Take my recent experiences with SharePoint, both an on premise version and the hosted version from MS 365:

Getting Ready
On premise: I have to find a physical server or make a new virtual server. I have to size it appropriately and then load Windows Server. I'm not really up on the latest versions of Windows Server, so this is 2008R2. Of course, before then, I had to buy Windows Server. Oh, and now I realize that I have to do the hardware and software thing all over again for SQL Server. While you can run both on the same hardware, it's not "best practice." I also have to worry about disk space on my SAN. SharePoint, if it's successful, can gobble up a lot of space. So now I have a Windows Server and a SQL Server, I need to buy and install SharePoint server. Same with SQL Server. It's not particularly onerous, but it's definitely a couple of days of work. So, lots of time and money later, I have the basic infrastructure to run SharePoint. But I still have to make sure I am monitoring the servers, backing them up, applying patches and anti-virus updates. So much work, and I haven't published the first page in my first site. Also, if I want this to work outside my LAN, I need to setup firewall rules.

Office 365: OK, I'm very lucky to work at a non-profit where Microsoft gives us Office 365 for free. SharePoint 365 is included. From a setup basis, I am done! And I have some ridiculous disk allocation - something like 1 TB if I want it.

The winner: Office 365 (even at commercial rates)

Deploying
On premise: Being fairly experienced with SharePoint, this is familiar ground for me. I map out sites and subsites. I create a navigation structure. I am tied to our internal Active Directory, so user setup is straight-forward. And being on my own server, I can add in 3rd party webparts easily, or even write my own. I can review logs and dive directly into the SQL Database.

Office 365: In this environment, I am using SharePoint 2013. It's nearly identical. I have my AD federated with MS, so user setup is easy. A downside I discovered: 3rd party webparts are more limited - only what you can get from the MS SharePoint store. And a real bummer: logging is almost non-existent. I can't see what pages are being accessed the most, or which users are contributing the most. MS really needs to fix that.

A major bonus with 2013, especially in the O365 offering, is Office Web Apps and OneDrive (nee Skydrive). With these apps, users can edit (heavily, although not as complete as the full Windows applications), view, share, version control and even group edit all documents, spreadsheets and presentations, all within a browser window. All of my users have 25GB of personal space, and I have a few hundred GB devoted to shared documents.

The winner: A toss-up, but the OneDrive integration with Web Apps has me giving the nod to Office 365

On-going support:
This is where the hosted variety really shines. I don't need to worry about the underlying infrastructure at all. It's being patched, virus protected, backed up and updated. It's load balanced across Microsoft's elastic cloud.

Of course, sometimes the all-included model can cause problems. MS recently released a patch (in some non-traditional way) that caused all O365 applications to say "something went wrong" or "we're sorry, but try again later." Late last year, the migration from SP 2010 to SP 2013 was not friendly. But they fixed these things pretty quickly, and you always run a risk of down-time with on-premise services, especially if you are a jack of all trades (master of none).

The winner: Office 365

Summary
I work for an organization with a small IT shop and a small budget. We don't have the resources to dedicate to server management, database management, SharePoint administration. Our Exchange server, SharePoint, and Office Apps with OneDrive all benefit from being hosted. We can quickly use these tools instead of spending all of our time and money preparing them for use. Sure, some of the use may be more limited than would be the case "On Prem", but if you don't have the resources to make all that other goodness work, it's not worth it.

I will be curious to see how my opinion may change with Lync. At the moment, we are making limited use of Lync in O365. But when we upgrade phone and video systems, we may find that this integration is too valuable to give up. Of course, by then Microsoft may have done a better job with this integration. And also, perhaps the VOIP phone system of our future will be cloud-based itself.

For things unique to your business or those that confer a competitive advantage, by all means run them in-house with in-house expertise. But for everything else, it's a better decision to forego a little control and a few features by going into the cloud. It frankly blows my mind that anybody runs in-house Exchange servers anymore. Servers, electricity, data centers, disaster recovery, software licenses, software upgrades, the cost of Exchange Administrators, disk space, etc. The cost is staggering, and all for email.