For the last decade, SharePoint deployments have consisted of on-premise deployments that require many servers, licenses, and ongoing care and feeding. In this model, there were typically one or more administrators or developers that were responsible for ensuring the farm was healthy.
This typically equated to server farms that had not been patched in years or had any maintenance done whatsoever. It was just easier to leave those servers alone because nobody really knew much about SharePoint. With the creation of the 365-application stack and the movement of applications like Exchange and SharePoint started occurring, so did the start of the changing support landscape.
Fast forward to 2017 and cloud adoption has skyrocketed and the Office 365 stack has been maturing and adding functionality rapidly. As some of our clients have transitioned to Office 365 in varying capacities they have asked the question “Do I really need a support contract since I moved to the cloud?” The answer to this is a resounding “YES”.
A common thought is since I don’t have the servers to be managed and maintained then there is really nothing more to support, I just use the product. Although the back-end administration and management have largely gone away, there is still a need for product expertise for you to implement the business process, reporting, automation, and other functionality that will provide true ROI for your investment in the platform.
This is a huge benefit to our clients and can be as well for your organization. All those hours that used to be spent patching, monitoring, and maintaining your SharePoint environment can now be spent working with the business to gather requirements and developing long term strategy for the usage of the 365 platform and applications that will deliver the required business functionality.
It is exciting to see the tremendous benefits for our clients in this shift to cloud services such as Office 365, Azure, and AWS. If you are contemplating a move to the cloud and have additional questions reach out and we will be happy to assist.
