SharePoint : Choose Cloud or On-Premises?

Determining whether to use SharePoint Online instead of on-premises SharePoint can be complicated.Here’s a simple set of questions to help determine if SharePoint Online makes sense

Question	Yes	No
Are you already using custom-coded SharePoint solutions, such as third-party tools or in-house Visual Web Parts?	0	3
Are you free from strict geographic control and accountability for your SharePoint content ?	4	0
Do you already have SharePoint engineers on staff?	0	3
Do you have a limited IT capital budget, but significant IT operating budgets?	1	0
Do you have a mature, on-premises installation of SharePoint 2010?	0	3
Do you have access to dedicated SharePoint developers?	0	2
Do you have as many or more users outside your corporate network as you do inside the firewall?	3	0
Do you need to downsize or eliminate physical servers and data centers used with SharePoint?	3	0
Do you need to migrate off a legacy installation of SharePoint 2007 or Windows SharePoint Services 3.0?	3	0
Do you need to rapidly set up a pilot or proof-of-concept SharePoint site, independent of any current usage?	3	0
Do you project growth to a very large content pool over the next year (500GB or more)?	0	2
Do you use or need to use SharePoint-hosted business intelligence solutions such as Performance Point?	0	2

Add up your scores, and see how you match up:
32: You are probably already on SharePoint Online or Office 365.    

24-31: You are a strong candidate for SharePoint Online. Study carefully and understand some of the functional tradeoffs of the platform. SharePoint Online doesn’t support the following:

• Deployment of custom solutions that require direct access to the server, such as Visual Web Parts. It does support sandboxed solutions, however.
• PowerPivot
• SQL Server Reporting Service Integration
• Business Connectivity Services (originally this was a blanket restriction, but a slipstream release in 2011 added support for access to web services-based remote data in O365 BCS).
• FAST Search Server Integration
• Web Analytics
• Site collections greater than 100GB

10-23: You are somewhere in between. Understanding the platform advantages and tradeoffs is essential to figuring out your cloud strategy. Odds are good that you may use a hybrid approach in which parts of your SharePoint world remain on premises, with other aspects living on Office 365.

0-9: If SharePoint is already living in your data center, it’s probably in the right place.


Office 365 and SharePoint Online lack features relative to on-premises SharePoint, this isn't expected to be a permanent situation. If we project forward through the next release of SharePoint, we can forecast a time when the on-premises and cloud versions of SharePoint provide nearly identical functions.
What will make it really interesting comes after that – when new features start showing up in the cloud before they are bundled into the next major SharePoint on-premises release. A cloud-hosted SharePoint offering with better functions and simplified ease of operation will be a hard combination to deny for many current on-premises users.