Wednesday, April 20, 2016

Is SharePoint On-Premises Really a Cloud?



Let me relate a quick story to you. We had two separate IT security incidents last week. One individual had ransomware that encrypted a good number of documents. Another individual had a crash related to windows updates with continual, unfixable reboots. These machines eventually were reloaded to fix the problems.

How does this relate to SharePoint though?

Both of these stories had varying degrees of heartache and pain associated with getting the machines functional again. One saving grace of the process though was that most of the daily work and critical files were stored in different cloud providers.

Why does this matter to SharePoint? “Cloud” solutions makes it easier to segregate your security into parts that do not have to be reloaded or compromised when an incident occurs on a local machine. With enough standardization of employee machines, moving to another laptop could make be as simple as logging on with your own username.

SharePoint is a cloud product. It always has been and always will be. A service doesn’t have to be on the internet to be a cloud solution. It simply has to be remote from the user’s local machine. SharePoint on premise is still a cloud solution, it’s just a private cloud.

I’m not going to argue whether Office 365 or SharePoint on-prem is the right choice for you. You’ve most likely already made that decision. What I’m here to urge is to seriously consider SharePoint as a central platform for your Information Technology solutions as a cloud provider. Through extranet solutions, your internal cloud can be just as accessible as internet based solutions. We do it every day here at PremierPoint Solutions.

It’s too easy to save your files locally. It just makes sense. But when catastrophe happens, that simplicity will be a liability. SharePoint, or any cloud service, plays an important role in removing local liability and putting your critical data into a safer location.

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