Share via

SharePoint in cloud computing

Question

Wednesday, August 22, 2012 6:37 PM

Hi All,

I am analyzing, how sharepoint could take an advantage and suits the infrastructure on cloud. So someone could help me for the below questions.

1. Can someone tell how sharepoint make use of cloud computing ?

2. Pros and Cons of the SharePoint on the use of cloud ?

3. Any real time example of sharepoint cloud ?

4. which version of sharepoint use the concept of cloud ? . I guess MOSS 2007 started.

If you come to know. please tell me.

All replies (4)

Wednesday, August 22, 2012 9:11 PM âś…Answered

To expand on what Trevor said, cloud is a very difficult term to address because it can be defined so much differently by so many different groups.

SharePoint can be deployed on a lot of different kinds of infrastructure platforms, and is supported on virtual machines. You can put SharePoint 2010 on virtual servers, as well as SharePoint 2007 and even SharePoint 2003 in most cases. Many cloud vendors offer SharePoint in the cloud running on virtual machines, and if there is a hosting company that offers a virtual server with enough CPU/RAM/storage to run SharePoint you can definitely put it on it. This type of cloud offering is commonly thought of as Infrastructure as a Service or IaaS. Amazon and Azure have started offering persistent VMs you can do this kind of thing with, and there's lots of other vendors out there doing this too.

Many hosting companies also offer hosted SharePoint solutions where you don't have administrative access to SharePoint's infrastructure components because the hoster takes responsibility for administrating the SharePoint farm and gives you limited rights to do things like create sites and manage security. In this scenario you often see that the hosted SharePoint implementation offers less functionality and options for customization than an on-premise SharePoint environment (or one where you have access to the full virtual server), depending on what the hoster wants to expose. The best example of this is the SharePoint Online service available as a part of Microsoft's Office 365 platform but vendors such as Rackspace and Fpweb also offer hosted SharePoint. This is usually referred to as either Software as a Service (SaaS) or Platform as a Service (PaaS), depending on your perspective.

SharePoint in the cloud comes down to a couple of different factors:

  • Can you handle the costs? It often gives you quantifiable price for implementing SharePoint, but if you go the IaaS route those costs can quickly escalate.
  • Can the hoster deliver performance? I've seen some IaaS hosting services struggle providing VMs that can host SharePoint effectively. This isn't the case with everyone, but its something to think about.
  • How's your bandwidth? Putting SharePoint in the cloud means you have to have a reliable and big enough connection to those cloud servers to get access to your resources.
  • Do you trust the hoster? Are they reliable? Are they secure? Are they going to stay in business? Do you trust them with your business data? Can you get your data out of them if you need to?
  • Is it easy for your users? Is sign-in easy? Can they use their existing AD accounts? Is user management straightforward?

Some hosting options off the top of my head (all of the PaaS vendors below offer SharePoint 2010 solutions):

If you want to look at SharePoint in the Cloud in a PoC or Testing environment you can check out CloudShare.com. They do not position their solutions as a Production environment, so it may not match exactly up with other options, but its something to think about. Office 365 also offers a free 30 day trial if you want to take a look at what it offers.

John

MCITP and MCTS: SharePoint, Virtualization, Project Server 2007
My books on Amazon: The SharePoint 2010 Disaster Recovery Guide and The SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Guide.
My blog: My Central Admin.

Wednesday, August 22, 2012 6:39 PM

Cloud is a nebulous term.

SharePoint can be hosted in the "cloud".  Office 365 is an example of that, and BPOS before it (which was MOSS 2007).

Yes there are limitations in the case of Office 365, namely that you can only use sandbox solutions, you don't have access to the full trust model for deploying solutions.  Other restrictions are present as well.

http://sharepoint.nauplius.net

Wednesday, August 22, 2012 10:52 PM

You can open an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account, and launch a Windows Server instance.  From there, you can install SharePoint Server (I did this to take a look at the SP2013 preview).  I didn't take it that far, but it worked great.  AWS offers all the tools you would need to have a successful deployment in their infrastructure.

If we didn't already have the infrastructure (i.e., our servers) in place to host and support SharePoint, I think AWS (or any other IaaS provider) would be a great way to go, while still maintaining administrative control.

Hope this helps.  I'm sure a search of Google could help you in finding some implementations of SharePoint on the cloud, whether offered as a service (as Microsoft does) or built on a cloud instance (like I described above).

Thursday, August 23, 2012 8:35 AM

Hi Keira knightley,

Office 365 and SharePoint Online is the next generation cloud productivity service from Microsoft.

SharePoint Online makes the power of the cloud work for your business.As part of Office 365,SharePoint Online lets you create sites to share your documents and information, making it easy to work together with colleagues and customers.

You can try it and find more technology from the below link:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/online-software.aspx