Here’s why moving to SharePoint Online is a good idea

There are numerous articles about the advantages of SharePoint Online doing rounds of the Internet. Each new day witnesses the rise of a new SharePoint implementation company and reports of more than half of the world’s Fortune 500 companies moving to Office 365 have become commonplace. These factors highlight how quickly the Cloud is capturing the imagination of corporate houses the world over. Naturally, migrating from on-premise to the cloud should seem like a wise decision. But if you’re finding yourself hanging between the pros of moving online and the tediousness of the migration, we’ve compiled a list of the best reasons that should help persuade you why taking the leap would be in your company’s best interests.

1. Easier Maintenance

The IT staff at most organizations invest up to 80% of their time and effort on maintaining existing infrastructure leaving a very thin margin for other technical tasks. Moreover, it takes a lot of money to keep the physical equipment required to support an on-premise SharePoint setup healthy and functioning properly. Add to that the headache of training in-house staff to perform all administrative tasks accurately and managing access permissions etc. Why not let the experts handle all of this? By moving your SharePoint implementation online you can hand over all of this to Microsoft and let them worry about it. This will not only cut your costs and give your teams more time for technical innovation, but also put you at par with your competitors’ strategy.

2. Automatic Updates

There’s hardly a Microsoft product that doesn’t get updated with enhancements, bug fixes, and new features. But keeping a track of what’s new and incorporating it into your SharePoint implementation could be an overhead. Any company you consult regarding SharePoint migration services would advise you to move your on-premise setup to the cloud in order to always stay up-to-date with the latest features and enhancements. SharePoint Online allows you to take the advantage of new features as soon as they are released without having to upgrade manually.

3. Better Security

As opposed to the belief that data on the cloud isn’t secure because you can no longer control access to it, the fact is that your SharePoint data is safer in Microsoft’s data centers and there are many reasons to support this fact. Data Centers have restricted access and only authorized people are allowed access, that too after clearing multiple layers of security mechanisms, all servers storing the data follow Government security regulations, all data is encrypted, proper threat management procedures are in place, organizational data isn’t mined for things like advertising, etc. Is there any way your SharePoint implementation can beat such a sophisticated level of security?

4. Access to the best SharePoint features

Although Microsoft tries to keep a healthy balance between the features it rolls out for on-premise setups and for the cloud, the stark truth is that the maximum technological innovation goes into creating features for the cloud. As such, organizations using SharePoint Online get access to advanced features that users of on-premise SharePoint might never get to experience, for example, Microsoft Graph, Delve, Flow, Office 365 Groups, PowerApps, etc. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing for on-premise users. Many such advanced features are launched for the on-premise users too but they get to use them much later than the cloud users. And in this competitive world, getting access to high-end features faster than others could be all the edge you need. Thus, it probably wouldn’t hurt to get that SharePoint migration consulting you’d been putting off.

5. No more Migrations

How great would it be if a technical task could be done once and forgotten about! Though it seldom happens in the IT industry, in the case of migrating to SharePoint Online, this is actually true. Once you move to SharePoint Online, you’re done with SharePoint migrations. No more version upgrades or platform migrations. Since you’ll be accessible to the latest SharePoint features as and when they’re released, you won’t need to worry about manual migrations. That means you won’t have to undergo any more painful planning, testing, training, etc. You’ll be good for decades. That can’t hurt.

Still unconvinced? Setup a call with Paragyte to know more about SharePoint implementation services and how you can reap the maximum benefits out of your SharePoint implementation by moving to the cloud.

Paragyte is a leading SharePoint implementation company with a proven track record of successful SharePoint development, integration, migrations, upgrades, and customizations. Visit https://www.paragyte.com/services/sharepoint/.

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