Top 10 Reasons Why Companies Need to Migrate to SharePoint Online

Microsoft SharePoint is a really promising platform considering the recent development and quick updates made by Microsoft. The company has recently moved the MS Office 365 services to the cloud, and now SharePoint which comes within the Office 365 Suite has now become SharePoint Online. Both Office 365 and SharePoint Online are now helping businesses together in improving workplace communication and collaboration. Several business enterprises are already leveraging the benefits of SharePoint Online and a mass adoption trend is visible. According to the Global SharePoint Industry Report 2017, SharePoint 2016 shown 67% increase in deployment of the platform’s on-premise version, whereas the deployments of SharePoint Online increased by 167%. However, many business owners still hesitate to move their content from the server to cloud. It is mainly because they lack understanding of the benefits that come along with the service. In this blog, we will be discussing the top 10 reasons that will help you decide that why you should migrate to SharePoint Online.

1. It Offers Simplified External User Access Management

SharePoint Online comes as the solution to all the limitations of on-premise users concerning their abilities to share content with external users. With SharePoint Online, users can share individual documents, folders, and sites with anyone having a Microsoft Account linked to their corporate email address. Additionally, guest links can also be assigned for special edits or read permissions.

2. It Makes Your ‘OneDrive for Business’ Experience Even Better

SharePoint Online provides you better access to OneDrive, enabling you to share and store your file in cloud. With OneDrive for Business, organizations get a place to store all their files securely in the cloud, that can be pulled, edited, and shared both internally and externally with any user on any device. Also, when you are saving your working files on the cloud in your ‘My Documents’ folder, you can define specific access permissions. Additionally, the new feature of ‘Sync Client’ enables you to sync the files between SharePoint sites and OneDrive for Business. Finally, you also get a mobile-friendly experience with the new OneDrive mobile app, which also provides you with analytics about the consumption of your document.

3. Don’t Need to Wait for Updates & New Features

Microsoft has always followed a proactive strategy for communication when it comes to new features and the latest updates. The user of Office 365 has the privilege of receiving all the updates at the earliest on upgrades and new releases as compared to those who are using SharePoint On-Premise.

4. Instant Access to Exclusive Features That Are Not Available On On-Premise Version

Microsoft Automate (which was formerly known as MS Flow), Delve, Graph and PowerApps are some of the services usually available under the umbrella of Office 365 and SharePoint Online.

5. Quick & Easy Access to SharePoint Online Anytime

As the name suggests, SharePoint Online and MS Office 365 allow users to work anytime from anywhere. Users of SharePoint Online are also free to work using any network and any device. In fact, they can work offline on their working files and can sync the contents to Windows Explorer. While working offline, any changes made will be updated and saved to SharePoint Online as soon as the user reconnects with the internet server. SharePoint mobile app is another interesting element since it is infused with Office Graph’s intelligence, which makes it really easy to track the user experience of every single user using SharePoint apps. This is personalized based on the user activity within SharePoint, and how they interact with each other, etc.

Read also → Successful Migration from SharePoint On-Premises to Office 365

6. Easy to Scale Up & You Only Need to Pay for What You Need

The ecosystem of MS Office 365 allows you to pay only for what you actually need. The monthly subscription model of the platform allows you to remove or add users as to changes within your organization. For instance, is a user leaves the company, you can easily remove or reassign the license to someone else. A similar kind of scalability is available when it comes to data storage, where you are required only to pay for the storage that you use, and you can also scale up your storage license in a few simple steps. The pricing structure is also very simple and flexible, and you can select the plan as per your business needs. SharePoint Online is offered in both annual and monthly subscription plans which varies according to the number of users, that you want to connect with under one plan.

7. Compliance & Security Improvements

People sometimes bring questions about Microsoft Cloud’s data security. But, in actuality, Microsoft’s Cloud and SharePoint Online both have multiple security layers for your data protection. Security layers in SharePoint Online include Physical Security, Data Encryption, backup, ID Protection, and Protection against Data Theft & Data Misuse.

8. Limited IT Resource Requirements

When you are migrating to SharePoint Online from SharePoint On-Premise, you don’t have to invest time in tasks like OS maintenance, backups, and SharePoint patches, etc. The free can be invested by your IT team into the overdue improvement of your intranet and other tasks. SharePoint Cloud helps reduce your internal resources you don’t need to buy any hardware.

9. No More Menace of Maintenance

Maintaining on-premise storage and data centers is undoubtedly very important, but it eats up a huge part of your operational costs. When validating and researching plenty of challenges in cloud migration, decision-makers often neglect or overlook the benefit ‘no in-house maintenance’. SharePoint helps you bring down the colossal operational costs and also results in saving hours of hard work by replacing it with a 15-minute backup and upgrade session. Above all, this does not take up any additional cost from your pocket.

10. Hybrid Benefits

If you are dearly attached to your SharePoint On-Premise server, you can still leverage the benefits of SharePoint Online; because with SharePoint, it is not an ‘either & or’ situation; for the reason that you can take benefits of the Hybrid Environment. So, for example, if you are apprehensive of security breaches and data theft issues by moving to the cloud, then you can keep all your confidential data on on-premise servers and can migrate the rest of the data to SharePoint Online Cloud, such as routine collaboration, etc.

Conclusion

Migrating to SharePoint Cloud has become a new trend for business enterprises. However, migrating to SharePoint Online or staying on SharePoint On-Premise completely depends on your business direction, needs, and strategy. So, if you are planning to migrate to SharePoint Online, you need to have a concrete migration plan, a complete understanding of all the costs involved, the tools that will be used, and the resources that will be engaged. If you have plenty amount of time on your plate and your in-house IT team is willing to learn, then you could involve them. But, if you are under a time crunch or your in-house team does not have enough team for the migration process, then you can connect with an expert SharePoint Development & Migration Company like Code Creators Inc. and consult them for expert opinion and migration services.