Migrate your Apps to Cloud with SharePoint Architecture

Cloud-based platforms are all the rage today. While scalability, cost savings and speed of deployment top the list of this business impetus, an increasing number of companies worldwide view cloud computing as a key factor of business revolution. This helps them forge new partnerships, improve customer engagement and drive competitive advantage.

SharePoint in the Hybrid Cloud Environment

SharePoint can be a great starting point to explore the potentials of cloud. It allows businesses to take the cloud advantage while managing sensitive data. Flexible management options make sure that you hold control of the data and infrastructure you need to meet the compliance needs.

Migrating SharePoint workloads to a cloud environment offers more flexibility to meet the data security requirements of your organization. It helps to:

• Reduce IT costs
• Expand capabilities
• Improve networks
• Accelerate deployments
• Augment agility
• Enhance total cost of ownership (TCO)

Features of SharePoint Architecture

Following are some of the major features of SharePoint architecture in the hybrid cloud environment:

• SharePoint SSL Certificatesto provide an extra level of data security.
• Personalized URLsto develop a public-facing website of particular interest.
• Office Web Appsto create, edit and share documents within SharePoint, wherever you access it.
• Specialized SharePoint Web Partsto improve a website’s capabilities for employee productivity and rapid deployment.
• SharePoint Active Directoryto enable synchronization and provide a single point to create, change or delete passwords and accounts.

How to migrate an on-premises SharePoint environment to a cloud?

SharePoint in the Cloud typically handles most of the maintenance and administration of the environment. Following are the different processes to migrate SharePoint to a cloud offering:

Script Migration Process

For some cloud solutions, mainly infrastructure-based solutions, PowerShell is used to script the migration of SharePoint content. It enables you to back up the individual site collections from one farm and eventually restore them to the other farm. You can then use the following syntax to accomplish a backup:

Backup-SPSite -Identity -Path [-Force] [-NoSiteLock] [-UseSqlSnapshot] [-Verbose]

Restore-SPSite cmdlet can be used to drop the website collection into the target SharePoint farm.

Outlook 2010 and SharePoint Designer
An alternative method to perform the SharePoint migration on a small scale is by using the client tools such as Microsoft Outlook 2010 or SharePoint Designer. The best thing about these tools is that they can be connected to both the target and the source SharePoint farms and can be used to manually transfer content between the environments. This approach works well even when the administrative access to the back end is not provided.

Third-Party Migration Tools
One of the most effective ways to enhance the SharePoint migration is to enlist the support of third-party tools such as ENow Mailscape, Sharegate, Clockwork Software, BitTitan and more. Each tool has different capabilities, so it becomes important to inspect the functionality of each tool and ensure it caters the technical and business needs of the migration.

Leveraging the Power of StoragePoint
SharePoint servers can be hosted locally by using SharePoint with StoragePoint. This gives you a feeling of having an ultimate control over your environment. At the same time, you take advantage of the cloud-based storage and other benefits you get in terms of cost, scale and availability. You can also mix and match your data, where some of it will be hosted locally while the rest will be pushed out to the cloud. The concept of mix and match enables your business to start slowly with the cloud based storage and expand as your comfort level improves and your implementation inflates.