Everyone knows that the Cloud is coming, and for a lot of us that means you won’t be doing what you are doing now. So I wanted to chime in on some of my experiences from both the Multi Tenant cloud and the Private Microsoft Cloud.
My thought, is we will be on the cloud for no longer than 10 years and then Hardware will have to come down in price to get people to purchase it, except if you are a cloud vendor, then you will pay high prices. And when it becomes cheaper for you to manage your own infrastructure (which 6 times out of 10 it already is) then you will see companies high tailing it back to their server rooms.
So first of all, migrating your data to the Cloud is a nightmare, and on the private cloud they only have it allowed for you to use Metalogix, so your pockets better already be deep. Also be prepared, because when you migrate, your lists and web parts are not going to migrate over well at all with Metalogix, actually not much migrates smoothly, because the top Nav Bar doesn’t come over on most sites also.
So now you are on the cloud, what happens when you get a correlation error, well this is the part that makes my prediction seem more correct, you have two options, either submit a ticket that sometimes completely goes ignored by Microsoft’s team, or just find your own work around, which is the way you will end up going with over time on 70% of your issues. Why you ask? Because it is not efficient to ask for help on something that you could get on and fix right away, you will adapt and find the work a rounds.
Ohh and don’t forget the latency, from our 2k plus users, I would say 40% of them have noted that they think the cloud is at least 20-30% slower than our on premise SharePoint farms.
So in conclusion, don’t worry about the cloud, too much, there will be plenty of places to migrate in those 5-10 years, we all can have work, we just need to improvise which is what IT is all about. But be prepared, because when companies start realizing what it truly is to be on the “Cloud” they will want to sky dive with  out a parachute so fast!
I still see companies that won’t let their security be delegated to the cloud. Like you say even if companies move to the cloud, the migrations will not be a piece of cake. It will take knowledge people to do complex transformations of data.
Stephan Onisick
Yea, O365 is nice, but you don’t have any privacy to be honest, if you are worried at all about security you need Private cloud. And when you aren’t in with the masses they cut your performance, because there isn’t enough people to complain is my guess.
The Cloud is a big word.. In my opinion Azure is pretty slow, however O365 is pretty fast. Â However, I still think On Premise Rocks if you have more than 20 users :).Â
