This is a series of 
articles marrying the why of a technology to the how-to of it, straight from the brains of the top Chateaux developers.
Migrations from On Premise servers to cloud hosting through Office365 are becoming an increasingly popular business solution, as large in-house servers become obsolete due to their costly upkeep. Our SharePoint developers work to transfer your documents and files into SharePoint Online, part of the Microsoft’s Office365 solution.
Chateaux’s skilled developers help clients easily access their data with little to no disruption or learning curve for their team after the migration.
Cybersecurity and confidentiality is important to business safety, and the online workspace has provisions to protect your data. Compliance with Microsoft’s strictest security controls is built in to the platform ensure top notch safety.
Learn about Microsoft’s Office365 Security here.
Abandon On Premise SharePoint: Why?
Surely you’ve heard the phrase, “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it.” While this is good advice in some instances — confidential data storage is not one of them. Waiting until On Premise servers “break” (which can manifest as hacking gone wild, an internal bug, hardware issues) should not be the impetus to secure your data.
On Premise SharePoint servers used to be the way organizations, and even politicians (!) securely held their information. However, today more and more businesses are moving to a cloud-based storage solution, such as Office365 Online.
What’s Wrong with On Premise Servers?
On Premise SharePoint servers lack the availability and load balancing capabilities that Office365 Online provides for the cost. Additionally, On Premise SharePoint requires your IT team to be responsible for the SharePoint farm and its upkeep.
The On Premise solution, however, does clearly allow business owners to differentiate between standard and enterprise licenses, which is more difficult in Office365.
However, by using Office365, your business only needs to pay for the amount of users it currently supports – no more – no less.
Learn more about the differences between SharePoint and Office 365 here.
How to Move from On Premise SharePoint to Office365?
Chateaux’s SharePoint developers have much experience migrating from On Premise servers to Office365 in various enterprise environments, for small to mid-size clients.
Our developers begin the process by “cleaning house” and cleansing the current data systems of their unused sites and orphan users. By running scripts, our developers manually and automatically clean the data, identify potential bottlenecks to minimize issues and help the migration go smoothly.
After the data is cleansed, it is synced to the new Active Directory. Next, client workflows are migrated to ensure automated business tasks will remain intact, synchronized, and effective.
It is a straightforward process with the right team of developers. Issues that arise are promptly mitigated along the way, as the Active Directory is smoothly synced (and adapt quickly when hiccups arise along the way!).
Once documents are migrated from the On Premise SharePoint Site to Office365’s SharePoint, developers ensure that the user interface is as similar as the old system as possible. The new site formatting is replete with corporate branding, familiar document organization, adherence to best practices and governance standards. The goal is a smooth transition for end users on the new system and ease the growing pains.
When Should I Migrate to Office365?
Now! Or as soon as possible.
On Premise SharePoint servers continue to depreciate and require more maintenance commitment from your IT Team. If your business is looking to migrate to a secure, reliable, cloud-hosted Office365 solution, look no further for an implantation partner! We can help.
