To first describe and baseline a “private cloud deployment, the following items and elements will typically be considered and implemented:
- Hosting SharePoint as infrastructure for a specific or a combination of workloads such as:
o Enterprise Search
o Application Platform for Line-of-Business (LOB) application
o Business Intelligence Implementations
o Collaboration, community and/or project sites
o Internet \ intranet Publishing portal
o Personal Sites
- In most all cases, SharePoint Private Clouds have:
- Repeatable, predictable automated deployment and provisioning
- Scalable, flexible architectures
- Ability to host many “customers” or tenants
- Upgrade, failover and patching resiliency
Many of these items can also be achieved in a hybrid cloud environment and should be planned for in your organization’s SharePoint roadmap.
There are several factors that influence an organization’s decision around which architecture (i.e. on-premise private cloud, public cloud, or hybrid cloud) they are going to design and implement for their short-term and long-term SharePoint roadmap needs such as:
- Information Architecture and Search
- Business Requirements
- Infrastructure Guidance
- Development Standards Creation
- The overall size of the organization and use base
- Security Issues
- Legal & Compliance Issues
- High Availability / Backup Issues
- Any project or deployment time constraints
- Complexity of Customers Current Environment
- Governance
- User Training and Adoption
- Management and tools
- Physical Locations
- Current Identity Infrastructure.
- Current IT Infrastructure model and future IT roadmap
- Network Bandwidth Issues
- Software / Hardware Issues
- Any Vendor Service Level Agreement (SLA)
- Internal resource issues as well as related training
- Support Alignment
- Service Reporting
- Standards Adoption and Management
- Development Alignment
- Infrastructure Alignment
- Development Platform Management
When taking complex environments into consideration there are also items such as:
- Multi-tenancy (Office 365 Issues when a user goes outside of I.T. to create a new “environment”)
- Multiple farms
- Security (FBA, SAML claims, Extranets)
- Global Clients with PHI, PII, Safe Harbor, Intellectual Property, EU Pushback, NSA concerns due to recent news
It is key to also look at your current operations and how well your organization will be able to adapt to change. There are existing maintenance windows that perform key backup and business continuity items as well as LOB (Line-of-Business) data connectivity updates and code promotion policies that much be considered.
This is the first in a series of blog posts by EPC Group on SharePoint 2013, Office 365 and considerations regarding a SharePoint “Hybrid Cloud” architecture.
