NewBase 19 April 2024 Energy News issue - 1717 by Khaled Al Awadi.pdf
Choosing & Using Cloud Services with SharePoint
1. No-Hype: Choosing & Using
Cloud Services with
SharePoint
Nick Kellett – CTO, StoneShare Inc.
nkellett@stoneshare.com
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Agenda
Introduction to Cloud Services
Cloud Architectures
Facts and Figures
Choosing Cloud Services
Common Cloud Services for SharePoint
How to Choose
StoneShare’s Journey
Managing Cloud Services
Evals, Setup, and Testing
Branding and Usability
Governance and Compliance
Integration and Customization
Switching Costs
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Facts and Figures
In 2011 Gartner's CIO Agenda Survey, cloud named as the top technology
priority for the year
Cloud Market:
• 43% growth of enterprise spending on cloud in 2012 (Gartner) - $6.1B
USD
• 48% expected growth in 2013 (to $9 B)
• In 2013, 5% of Global 1000 Companies will broker 2+ cloud services
• In 2014, 30% of Global 1000 companies will broker 2+ cloud services
• Amazon AWS - $750M this quarter
• Salesforce – $3B in FY2013
• Microsoft Office 365 – 25% of enterprise customers now have it; $1B
revenue target
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Types of Cloud Architecture
• Cloud computing service models
• Software as a Service (Saas) = rent the software product (ex Office 365)
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) = rent the hardware (ex Amazon, Windows Azure)
• Platform as a Service (PaaS) = rent the dev tools to develop and use a modular
software (ex Force.com, Google AppEngine or Windows Azure)
• Cloud computing service models depend on
• Advanced web services technology
• Shared services and virtualized infrastructure
• Multi-tenanting and user self-provisioning
• Utility computing and metering
• Defined Service Level Agreements
• Economies of scale
• Internet Connectivity
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Adoption Drivers
• Big Data
• Storage and archiving
• Cost savings and reliability improvements
• Self-service, anytime, anywhere access
• BYOD
• Social Web
• Business unit requirements
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Risks and Challenges
• Reliability and availability
• Security and Privacy
• Authentication and Authorization
• Governance and Compliance
• Lack of standards
• Migration
• Forecasting and future-proofing
• Vendor lock-in and switching costs
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Common Cloud Services for SharePoint
• Software as a Service (SaaS)
• Microsoft
• Dynamics CRM *
• Yammer *
• Skype *
• SharePoint Online (Office 365) *
• Exchange Online (Office 365) *
• Lync Online (Office 365) *
• Outlook and SkyDrive Live *
• Other Vendors
• Twitter? *
• YouTube? *
• StrikeIron
• Salesforce
• Platform as a Services (PaaS)
• CloudShare *
• Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Microsoft Windows Azure
• Infrastructure as a Service
(IaaS)
• CloudShare *
• Amazon Web Services (AWS) *
• Fpweb.net
• Microsoft Windows Azure *
• Rackspace OpenCloud
• * Red highlight means we use this at
StoneShare
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How to Choose
• Compliance restrictions
• Strategic platforms vs tactical services
• Service Provider analysis
• Longevity and stability
• History of Cloud service offering(s)
• Breadth of offering
• Clarity of strategic vision and roadmap
• Behaviour during outages
• Compatibility with SharePoint
• Value
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StoneShare’s Journey – Where We Began
• In 2007 StoneShare was founded in a shared office space in Ottawa
Canada
• As a Microsoft partner all the infrastructure was based on Microsoft and
we used SharePoint 2007 and later 2010 for our intranet
• No thought was given to the physical or logical infrastructure
• Everything was hosted on premise at the office
• No redundant power supplies, servers, clustering, or hardware of any kind
• I joined the company as Chief Technical Officer in early 2009
• We moved shortly afterwards to our present day headquarters in Hull
Quebec
• We began growing an average of 100% every year
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StoneShare’s Journey – Problems
Infrastructure Problems:
• Our SharePoint projects require multiple farms, massive hardware and
software resources – we run approximately 60 SharePoint Farms at any
one time
• As a young company we had immature business processes and no tools
• Rampant growth made it impossible to predict our infrastructure needs
• We kept bringing more and more staff on – from 4 people in 2008/2009 to
45 today
• There was no free time or money to implement more robust traditional
enterprise systems
• Our building kept experiencing power outages which affected our systems
• I was not confident in the administration or configuration of our on-
premise systems
• We would have had to rebuild our systems to resolve these problems
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StoneShare’s Journey – Other Drivers
• Satisfy our staff expectations – they are very tech savvy – have high
expectations
• BYOD – we wanted to support our Blackberry, Android, iOS, and
Windows users securely
• Focus on our main business drivers and expertise and let the
infrastructure and services “take care of themselves”
• Take advantage of new technology trends over time
• Be able to advise clients from first-hand experience
• Align with Microsoft’s strategic direction
• Provide an IT Service offering model (ITaaS) = IT unit that is business-
focused rather than cost-focused, agile
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StoneShare’s Journey – Where We Are
• Today only our intranet and public website are hosted on-premise (in a
data centre)
• We use cloud hosting for:
• Lync, CRM, Exchange, Yammer, and Skype (Microsoft Office 365)
• Source control (Beanstalk)
• Internal and External Help Desk (Zendesk)
• Development defect tracking (Fogbugz)
• Development, QA, Testing, and Demo servers (Amazon EC2 and CloudShare)
• Cloud archiving and Storage (Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier)
• We created an internal project to upgrade our infrastructure, and evaluate
and migrate to the Cloud services
• It took over a year of effort to switch our systems to the cloud
• It required professional assistance setting up robust ADFS for
authentication to O365
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Evals, Setup and Testing
• 1) Determine Requirements
• Document your business requirements
• Confirm requirements can be met by service “on paper”
• 2) Cloud service trial period
• Ignore “free” or “basic” plans
• Start with the middle plan and evaluate for 1 month
• Create and execute test cases against the business requirements
• 3) Identify gaps
• Are gaps met by higher level plans? If YES, upgrade and test against that plan.
• If not, are gaps met by customization or integration? If YES, is this a PaaS or supported
customization or integration?
• If NO, re-evaluate the business requirement OR avoid using cloud service.
• 4) Conduct Pilot
• Identify pilot group(s)
• Set rules around supported data and functionality
• Generate training materials and how to guides – linking to cloud service material
• Conduct pilot
• Debriefing and lessons learned, next steps
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Branding and Usability
• Branding
• Little or no customization is supported
• Expect massive inconsistencies in branding
• Investments in internal branding are likely to have little return apart from improved
usability (doubtful)
• Public-facing cloud services are likely to require branding customization work
• Usability
• Each service looks and behaves differently
• Platforms are good because there is likely to be more consistency
• The best cloud services are intuitive – ex Yammer and Outlook 365
• Watch out for:
• Branding and UX consistency is one of the big downsides of hosted services
• Overlapping feature sets = confusion and risk of duplicating data
• Dynamic user experiences = hard to troubleshoot
• Mobile device experience on multiple platforms
• Change Management is required to get people adopting services
• Some services offer better user experiences
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Governance and Compliance
• Governance
• Cloud services are enterprise systems
• They need to be governed
• Create governance policies for their usage
• It is better to set expectations with users rather than lock down functionality
• However, most services allow partitioning of functionality by user profile
• Compliance
• You must be able to easily and regularly report on cloud service usage
• Minimum reports needed are Usage auditing, Security permissions
• Ideally you could tell which IP addresses and/or devices accessed the service
• Watch out for
• Service administrator accounts – can be hard to delegate access sometimes (ex
CloudShare)
• Plan levels – often governance and compliance features are in more expensive plans
(ex Yammer)
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Customization and Integration
• Integration
• Integration is ALWAYS possible
• Cloud services are built to allow it – via APIs or provided tools such as widgets
• Uses common web protocols – SOAP, REST, JSON, Atom / RSS
• Customization
• Approach customization carefully
• You may have few or no supported customization options
• SaaS – varies by product (ex Dynamics CRM vs Yammer)
• PaaS – built to support customization (ex Google AppEngine)
• Mashups
• ProgrammableWeb.com
• SharePoint App Store
• NintexLive
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Switching Costs
Are you switching to other Cloud providers or bringing On-Prem?
Switching is ALWAYS a migration exercise
Data
• How do you export your data?
• Importing data - what format is your export in?
Security and Privacy
• What happens to your old data when you close your account?
• Has authentication and authorization changed?
Functionality
• How do you migrate functionality?
• What features are you losing/gaining?
• Change Management
• Watch out for:
• Automatic billing renewal dates
• Early termination costs
• Favour cloud services with robust / varied Data Import/Export options
28. Thank you for your attention!
This presentation will be available on the Toronto
SharePoint Summit web site a few days after the event.
29. Please rate this session!
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