Looking at Azure: Options for SharePoint Implementations in the Cloud

 

Cloud is one of the darlings of the IT industry these days. Beloved for its simplicity of service delivery, flexibility, and potential cost savings, cloud is a trend that is evoking positive responses within a more consumerized industry. Small and medium businesses, along with early adopting industries, have been the quickest to move to the cloud. For businesses that are larger, more conservative, or have existing investments, at least a portion of their workloads and systems will look to leverage the cloud over time. It is this support and demand for cloud solutions that has driven vendors to upgrade their products.

Microsoft recommends that Office 365 should be used to deliver SharePoint solutions wherever possible, and this is an excellent distinction. For use cases where out-of-the-box SharePoint can meet your needs or if your business does not have compliance and data abstraction concerns, removing the infrastructure management layer of your implementation is a valuable proposition. For more involved implementations, Microsoft Azure can help you bridge the gap between achieving your cloud strategy and your specific business needs.

Microsoft offers four recommended SharePoint solutions for Azure Infrastructure Services:

  1. Development and Test Environments: Often simpler than production setups, development and test environments are at higher risk of damage or compromise. The speed, ease, and flexibility with which you can manage and create farms in Azure in comparison to on-premises makes this an excellent option. Azure can also make it easier to set up fully isolated networks and domains to protect your production environment.
  2. Disaster Recovery (from On-premises): Traditional backup and disaster recovery (DR) setups require separate SharePoint standby farms located in different geographic locations – often housed by a hosting provider. Azure can deliver the same sort of setup at a lower cost with less capital expense.
  3. Internet Facing Sites: As shown by the removal of the Public Facing Sites feature, internet facing sites require more customization than offered by Office 365. Scalability advantages, along with the ability to leverage Azure Active Directory to create a solution that resides separately from your internal systems, make Azure an excellent option.
  4. App Farms: App Farms have unique roles that do not require customization. Using Azure to host this role can deliver the same functionality with reduced cost.

The situations above are all excellent use cases for Azure. However, from experience dealing with clients using or proposing SharePoint, Azure is an option that can aid technical response and help meet business objectives. Some examples include:

  1. Delivering “like-for-like” functionality to current on-premises solutions: Azure offers the closest thing to like-for-like functionality in the cloud as SharePoint on-premises. For businesses with existing investments in solutions such as workflow, custom intranets, custom branding, business intelligence implementations, or line-of-business apps, moving to Office 365 can be difficult. Most SharePoint implementations include items such as full trust code, third-party products, or high levels of integration with other systems. Each of these investment areas are very difficult to migrate without rebuilding or refactoring, or difficult to deliver using the Office 365 Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering alone. Azure enables the use of full trust code, workflow, and third-party components while being hosted in the cloud.
  2. Azure as a transition zone: For those wanting to leverage the cloud but still not sure if they are ready for Office 365, Azure is a very tempting step. I have been working on a project where the client was focused on consolidating multiple complex custom SharePoint environments into a single on-premises setup. Now, they are looking at how they can transition their current setup to Azure. Doing this will enable them to gain cloud benefits without the loss of the existing investments.
  3. Azure provides bottomless storage: SharePoint environments – especially those that provide enterprise content and document management – can be data intensive. Azure provides storage services that can be consumed for cloud-based environments and on-premises setups. There are three scenarios where data growth which increases costs can be addressed:
    • Unstructured data (BLOBs) can be offloaded out of Microsoft SQL Server into other storage tiers. In appropriate situations, data removed from SQL Server can be placed in lower-cost Azure storage.
    • SharePoint data that is old or no longer relevant can be flagged for archival but not deletion. Placing archived content into Azure for storage delivers a lower-cost solution while also ensuring that you are able to retrieve data later if required.
    • Backups of both SharePoint and other environments can be uploaded to Azure to provide cheap storage and a highly available, offsite DR setup.
  4. Azure-based hybrids: Business intelligence and intranet solutions tend to require a high level of customization due to business needs. This doesn’t even account for effort spent on line-of-business systems developed. Collaboration areas and more traditional team sites, however, constitute a large percentage of data and are heavily based on out-of-the-box features. Hybrid cloud environments that rely on Azure for custom components and Office 365 for out-of-the-box items can provide the lowest cost and highest functionality. When properly designed and implemented, these hybrid solutions can be nearly undetected by end users.
  5. Transforming and loading your data via Azure: For customers moving to Office 365 from on-premises SharePoint or other legacy systems, migration tools are required to load data. Installing migration solutions into production environments or performing data transformation in the source can create costs and complications. Moving the data to Azure and transforming through a form of cloud bursting can reduce migration time and costs along with administrative overhead.
  6. Use Azure for Office 365 backup: Microsoft is very transparent about its uptime, failover conditions, and backup setup for Office 365. For some organizations, this meets their concerns. Others have reasons for wanting more hands-on control of their backup data. Azure can provide a location for Office 365 backups and create a second tier of cloud redundancy.
  7. Azure for On-Premises Databases: Recent developments in SQL 2014 and 2016 including Azure Blob Storage, and Stretch Databases are beginning to offer another cloud bursting technique for businesses.

SharePoint and Office 365 are currently undergoing a rapid rate of change. Businesses are looking for solutions that are quicker to implement, cheaper to maintain, and offer more flexibility. However, those who have already invested in their current technology stack are not ready to be early adopters of SaaS technology, or find that pure SaaS offerings don’t meet their current business needs.

These challenges are the basis of the hybrid story that is becoming a key topic of conversation in the market. Azure, while still a very pure cloud solution is currently proving to be an excellent path for many organizations. Azure’s strength lies in the business and project needs it helps resolve, not just the technology it provides. For any business looking to invest in new tools or change their IT strategy towards the cloud, Azure definitely should be a core consideration.

 

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Blair Hainsworth, Technical Solutions Professional, AvePoint

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