On-premise benefits?

[Velvis]

I have a client (small church) that is looking to organize their data for access from employees and some outside vendors as well as remote access to it. (right now its just kinda willy-nilly peer to peer sharing)
One of the employees seems to be leaning towards an on-site server.

I can think of a million reasons why to avoid a on-prem server and go M365, but are there any pros to using on-premise still?

 

[Sky-Knight]

Not really, especially for a non-profit. They get E1 for free and E3 for $4/user per month.

You can do A LOT with E3. So much so that you'd need to have a really large church with a huge local media vault to justify a proper server. I'd M365 them, and then back that up with a Synology that syncs data to Backblaze for local media storage.

 

[Porthos]

This topic is not what I thought it was going to be about.

 

[SAFCasper]

Main reasons we come across for on-premise servers:

1) An LoB application that requires it. This is by far the most common reason.

2) Combination of large files + poor internet.

3) A general want/need for fast access. SharePoint or Azure files are never going to outperform a local fileserver no matter how good your internet is. Even with a gigabit line, you latency is likely 30ms+ versus sub-1ms to a local fileserver.

 

[timeshifter]

3) A general want/need for fast access. SharePoint or Azure files are never going to outperform a local fileserver no matter how good your internet is. Even with a gigabit line, you latency is likely 30ms+ versus sub-1ms to a local fileserver.

Thinking this could be mitigated by having OneDrive / SharePoint keep local copies of files you're working on (download or offline, forget exactly what they're calling it). In fact it could be faster? If you're working on say a CAD project, it might take a while for the local copies to be synced to your local drive. But from there they'd load really fast and you'd have the advantage of having them maintained by the cloud server.

 

[Sky-Knight]

I've got a company doing Solidworks out of a Team right now, it works great.

We're still looking into an Azure hosted file server because they want PDM to go with it, and the PDM process has checkin/checkout abilities. After some testing I found their 300mbit cable line was only adding 1 second to file open times vs a local share.

Yes, that's measurable, and it adds up... but it's a cheaper cost than putting a local server in, with a UPS, and backups, and BDR equipment, and everything else you'd have to do to make it properly comparable to a simple Azure instance. So it's going into Azure.

But yeah, if your Internet connection is actual crap you don't have much of a choice. BUT even if it is crap, Teams configured Sharepoint sync'd local via OneDrive is pretty workable.

 

[SAFCasper]

Thinking this could be mitigated by having OneDrive / SharePoint keep local copies of files you're working on (download or offline, forget exactly what they're calling it). In fact it could be faster? If you're working on say a CAD project, it might take a while for the local copies to be synced to your local drive. But from there they'd load really fast and you'd have the advantage of having them maintained by the cloud server.

Yeah, it could work really well in that scenario. Or on the flipside if they have a significant amount of data and frequently jump between multiple.projects you now need 2TB+ SSD's in every workstation.

Maybe that's not an issue for the client, maybe it is. As with most things it's going to depend on the client and their needs/budget.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

What kind of "data"?
For files only...why not 365?
For non profits, Microsoft 365 Business Premium is FREE for the first 10 licenses, and only $5 per user after that.
E3 is...on it's way to the sunset, M365 Biz Prem is the way to go now. And the level 1 licenses...free (hosted services only, no local apps).