Sharepoint migration from on-premise to online - How your business benefits

The whole world is moving its data into the cloud, so why would you stay behind? 

It’s time to move your data to the cloud-based SharePoint services that let you communicate and collaborate better. It is not just the cost-based subscription but a host of other features, such as 99.9% availability, ease of maintenance, lower latency, and high bandwidth, that are making SharePoint Online the preferred choice.

If you’re still hesitant about whether to move data from on-premise SharePoint, here are the top benefits of SharePoint migrations to SharePoint Online.

Why make the shift to SharePoint online?

Organizations are moving over to SharePoint Online to leverage the modern user experience it offers through the latest Office 365 features. SharePoint Online is also evolving and improving constantly, giving users the provision to modernize.

There are a few key features that have been alluring organizations toward SharePoint Online, thus helping them embark on a new digital transformation journey.

Minimize IT resource expenditure

As SharePoint users, we have the tendency to ignore the cost of data centers and on-premise storage maintenance. But by migrating to SharePoint online, a major chunk of your cost gets saved. Even post-migration, there will be less expenditure, as you don’t have to buy any hardware. By migrating to SharePoint Online, you can also skip tasks like data backup, SharePoint patches, and maintenance.

Improve data security and compliance

When you deal with business-critical and confidential data, SharePoint Online can be your best escape. It also safeguards the data centers with multiple additional layers of physical security. Moreover, your data stays safe on the disks that use BitLocker encryption. Apart from the above security measures, SharePoint Online users can also enjoy features like multiple backups and redundancies, multifactor authentication, protection against data mining, etc.

Pay only for what you use and scale-up as demand grows

The advantage of having SharePoint Online is its flexible subscription model and scalability. The subscription plan is user-based. You can add as many users as you want or drop a few to make your business cost-effective according to the workload.

The scalability of SharePoint Online will allow you to easily change the license to something more suitable for the current situation. When it comes to the storage facility, Office 365 has a pay-as-you-go option for you. It lets you pay for the storage you want.

Access business data on any device from anywhere

The modern work culture needs you to be able to work from any place. It also requires you to be available for work even when you are on the move. SharePoint Online is a part of the cloud-based Microsoft Office suite named Office 365.

So, you can work from anywhere on any device with SharePoint Online. Since the team members are not restricted to using one specific device or network, they enjoy the flexibility and work with more efficiency.

They can even work on the documents in offline mode and later, sync them to SharePoint Online when the internet connection is back. SharePoint Online users can also enjoy mobility with the robust mobile app.

It enables you to work with internal and external members of a project, no matter what your location is. This app also supports tracking user experience and customization based on activities on SharePoint.

Experience new SharePoint features

Do you want to enjoy the new stunning features that Microsoft 365 offers? In that case, migrating to SharePoint Online would be a great decision. SharePoint Online users will receive early updates for the next SharePoint version or any new ad-hoc feature releases.

Get access to OneDrive for business

By moving to SharePoint Online through SharePoint migration, you can also make OneDrive available for your business. OneDrive for Business is a Microsoft product that allows you to store all your files in one place. With this, your team members can share files with each other without much hassle.

Easy updates without any downtime

SharePoint Online automatically updates itself in the background. Microsoft hosts the software on its cloud solution, and they take care of all software maintenance. Thus, you and your business team can easily get the latest version of SharePoint without closing operations for a while.

These updates don’t change SharePoint site customization but secure your SharePoint ecosystem. Organizations don’t have to wait because the latest features and security patches become instantly available to SharePoint Online users.

On the contrary, a SharePoint on-premise farm requires skilled resources, a lot of planning, data auditing, and error-prone manual tasks. In some cases, you may need to shut down a part of the business process if a SharePoint workflow needs rebuilding on the new version.

Migration Approach

Typically, migration to SharePoint Online follows a four-step approach, beginning with system study that includes requirement validation with business users, UX design finalization, migration strategy, and migration prioritization, then moving onto pre-migration activities that include portal categorization, component redesigning, and staging instance setup. 

The next step is content migration, which includes pre-migration script execution, content movement to production using the migration tool, then redesign and development, which includes component developments using SPFx, search configurations, Web Jobs / Azure functions, responsive UI development, and finally, validation. 

However, defining the migration approach would be based on parameters such as: existing versions of SharePoint On-Premises: SP 2007, 2010, 2013 or 2016, amount of customization and integration required, content database size and data types.

Take a look at our case studies to understand InfoBeans’ approach to Sharepoint migration:

SharePoint Online benefits

With a host of benefits, Sharepoint Online is your go-to collaboration tool for making work easy, seamless, and optimized. Some of the benefits are no on-premise infrastructure licensing and support costs; modernized and responsive UX, implementation as per the latest technology /features, zero-downtime deployment, improvement in site rendering performance, better productivity, seamless integration with Microsoft Office; and a customizable UI.

If you are thinking of migrating from an older version of SharePoint to SharePoint Online, please get in touch with our team of experts. Write to us at sales@infobeans.com