Moving from On-Premises to SharePoint for Productivity & Security
Most companies will be familiar with having an on-site physical server, which among other things, provides a central place to store your company documents. Unfortunately, there has always been costs and risks associated with this type of setup, which modern technology has aimed to solve.
Most SMEs with physical servers have multiple single points of failure. For example, you likely have remote workers or multiple office locations, who all connect securely via a Virtual Private Network (VPN) into a central office location, which houses the server containing your company documents. But what if that central office’s firewall/router device was to go pop, or the internet connection was to drop? All the remote workers would suddenly lose access to all these documents.
Or worse still, what if a critical piece of infrastructure at that central office location was to go down, like a network switch, or perhaps the server itself, then suddenly everyone in the organisation would lose access.
As well as operational risks, there’s also usually quite a hefty CapEx spend associated with hosting your own equipment. Hardware, like the server, usually needs replacing every 3-5 years, and there are numerous other associated costs which usually go under the radar, such as energy bills, support and warranty costs, licensing costs, etc.
As mentioned, modern technology has aimed to solve this by introducing ‘the cloud’. In this scenario, that means moving your company documents to Microsoft’s SharePoint solution which can solve all of these problems, and more, as well as give you access to other new and genuinely useful features too.
You may have seen articles or demos of SharePoint before, and you may be thinking, “all our staff are going to have to learn a new way of working to be able to use SharePoint”, but luckily, this isn’t the case.
There are multiple ways to access the documents stored in SharePoint. One way is via a web browser. You simply browse to your company’s Microsoft SharePoint site, and from there you can browse/open/edit/upload documents as required.
Instead, you can utilise the OneDrive application (that is likely already installed on your computer) to give you shortcuts to the SharePoint sites you need access to. This way, you’ll be accessing your same company documents in almost exactly the same way as you did before. But rather than clicking on your network drive in File Explorer, you’ll be clicking the OneDrive shortcut in File Explorer instead.
So, what are some of the benefits of moving from on-premises file shares to Microsoft SharePoint?
- Flexibility to be able to work from any location, from any device, with an internet connection. And inversely, you can also restrict access to things like only allowing connections to SharePoint from devices you trust or coming from known and trusted locations.
- Continue working on files even when you don’t have an internet connection – simply select which files you want to be available offline, and next time you’re without an internet connection, you can continue working on those files.
- Version History – SharePoint automatically creates snapshots of your documents, along with a full audit history, giving you the ability to view or revert to any previous snapshot.
- Co-authoring – SharePoint has built-in functionality to allow multiple users to view and edit the same document at the same time. You can even see who’s viewing or making changes to the document live!
- When you need to search for something using the SharePoint web portal, not only will it search against file and folder names, but it will also search through the contents of all your documents. Perfect for when you know what you’re trying to find, but you can’t quite remember where it was stored!
- Reducing (or hopefully eliminating) the cost and maintenance of physical infrastructure equipment on-premises, such as servers, or network storage devices.
- Removing the risk and reliance on single points of failure that are often brought about when hosting your own infrastructure.
So, you’re probably just wondering, “well how much does this all cost?”.
Most businesses already have Microsoft 365 licenses, so it’s quite possible that you already have access to SharePoint and can start using it straight away for no additional licensing cost. The bzb IT team can confirm that for you if you’re unsure.
Then, there’s just the cost of prepping, planning and carrying out the migration of your on-premises documents to Microsoft SharePoint – something our Professional Services team have been doing for a couple of years now for a wide variety of customers.
