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CHAPTER 1 ■ OFFICE 365: MOVING TO THE CLOUD
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The RDCC IT manager reviewed the support requested and proposed a budget of $123,000, approximately
$10,000 per month. The IT manager expects this will consume half of the on-staff IT professional time at a cost of
about $70,000. RDCC management looked at the cost and requested the IT manager do a comparison against the
monthly costs using a subscription (cloud) model.
The IT manager reviewed the information and was shocked to see that the on-premises solution costs $7,000
per month more than the Microsoft Office 365 solution. He also became aware that he could free up half of his time
not having to manage an on-premises server. RDCC’s management reviewed the financials and chose the Microsoft
Office 365 solution, saving $150,000 in a one-year period. RDCC management also committed to having all of their
franchise users use Microsoft Office applications as the office standard and decided to deploy two distinct offerings
for franchises. At the franchise level, they specified the E1 service with Office Web applications. This allowed the
franchise owner to use either the web applications or purchase the retail version of the Office software. At RDCC
corporate offices, they can either use the Office subscription service (E3) or deploy the Office 2013 software through a
volume license.
RDCC’s decision to use Microsoft Online Services reduced the CAPEX and OPEX for the fiscal year. RDCC IT staff
estimated that the deployment costs were between $50 and $100 per person in one-time fees, for a total of $6,000. The
$6,000 migration cost for the RDCC deployment was one-fifth the estimated cost of the Exchange 2010 deployment.
RDCC management realized that the selection of online services significantly reduced the cash outlay for the
organization.
Line of Business Applications
LOB applications are unique to a business or a business segment. A good example of a LOB application is an
insurance documentation archive system designed to handle insurance agency data. This LOB application is not
relevant to, for example, a retail segment that does not handle insurance agency documents. Likewise, an LOB
application of a point-of-sale (POS) system would not be a relevant application for a RDCC cupcake simulation.
RDCC’s LOB application consists of the simulation application and the Microsoft Access database that is used in
the simulation. The Access database is known to consume network bandwidth. However, with Office 365, the Access
database can be shared from the cloud SharePoint service, so the database that is used locally is cached, and changes
are replicated to the cloud. The Access database can also be linked to Windows Azure (an extension of Office 365
cloud services) and integrated with Office 365. Thus, the user accesses the database locally, and transaction change
records are replicated to the cloud. This allows multiple users to have access to the information in real time without
over-using available bandwidth. This is possible because updates are driven to client desktops only as they are
“cached.”
RDCC IT staff concluded that the LOB application no longer needed a server to support the application. The IT
manager reviewed SharePoint online services and decided that this software only needed minor customization to
make it useful. This decision allows the IT management to reduce the server “farm” by one more server, with a savings
of about $20,000 on top of the budget savings of $90,000—all made possible by not deploying on-premises equipment.
Requirements for On-Premises and Cloud Data
The final concern for RDCC was how to address backup data issues. RDCC has a business requirement under
Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) that all financial data needs to be recoverable. RDCC has also been involved in much
litigation, so they are well aware of the e-discovery impact to the business. In recent litigation RDCC was required
to process all of the e-mails on their Exchange server and turn over the e-mail data as part of the litigation. Because
RDCC did not have an archive retention policy, they received a federal court order that mandated a freeze in the
deletion of data and placed all RDCC hardware on a legal hold. The IT staff had to recall all laptops from the field
and copy the users’ personal archives to the server so the data could be processed for electronic discovery. This was
extremely expensive.