It’s while renting a magnificent upper-class house on the Atlantic coast of France, that I realised that I would have never been able to taste the life of the rich for 3 days without AirBnB, a.k.a. the sharing economy.
I won’t be talking about the rights and wrongs of the sharing economy. I just thought about the similarity of this phenomenon with Microsoft SaaS: Microsoft 365.
As worldwide population grows bigger and bigger, as the gap between poor and extremely rich get larger and larger, the middle class shrinks.
Fewer and fewer people can afford their own little countryside or seaside cottage.
It’s the same thing with organisations and their IT system.
Which compagnies would invest massively into an on-premise platform just to do some mundane but still important tasks such as sending an email or storing documents?
No-one can invest into massive, top of the range, highly redundant, international data-centres with top notch security and technical procedures. Microsoft 365 offers just that.
A question of trust
The same as people trusts AirBnB’s hosts that they will deliver a service of quality by providing clean bed sheets and a functional home, small and big organisations now trust providers like Microsoft to host their data.
Who would have thought a few years back that Swiss bankers like UBS will put their data in the cloud? A cloud owns by an United Statian company too!
Swiss banking, the traditional kingdom of ultra-secrecy!
The changes that empower the cloud
Things are changing and our society is slowly but surely adapting to it.
The best examples being the Cloud Act and the RGDP. Strict and understandable legal frameworks which brings more protection for both organisations and individuals.
Cloud providers have listened to their client needs. Data centres are now built in every part of the world, answering long lasting legal requests from government and organisations.
Those changes help addressing cloud security concerns from organisations of all size.
Adaptation
A few years back, Microsoft announced SharePoint 2016 and people saws that most improvements made were actually done on the Online version. Now with SharePoint 2019, it’s the same story again. Most features of the on-premise version have been delivered before on the Online version, also a lot of new out-of-the-box features and news ways of developing customs functionalities can only be done on Office 365.
There is still a high demand for hybrid scenario but we know for a fact that the days of on-premise-only SharePoint farms, are numbered.
Even with a political willingness, moving to the cloud can be challenging technically. Would that be moving mailboxes to Exchange Online or sites and custom developments to SharePoint Online.
The intricate dependency with Active Directory for Exchange and migrating custom SharePoint applications and sites can prove a long investment with arduous efforts.
The requirements of replacing on-premise platforms, such as for example, the end of support of an OS like Windows 2008 R2, can be a good opportunity to move to the cloud.
So, get ready for the cloud, before your boss asks for it!
