Key Benefits of igroup’s Approach

As specialists in SharePoint, Microsoft Azure and AWS, igroup have extensive experience in creating efficient cloud hosting environments for SharePoint. Throughout your engagement with our team, you benefit from this technical experience and our commitment to helping your business achieve your goals successfully:

More than 10-years’ experience working with SharePoint
Fully certified UK based technical team
Full monitoring and support for SharePoint hosting in Azure or AWS
Regular reviews of your environment to ensure it meets your changing needs
24/7 support and 99.999% uptime SLAs for Hosting

To find out more about how hosting SharePoint in Azure or AWS with igroup can improve security and platform stability, please contact a member of our team today on 0203 697 0302 or fill in your details below and we will call you back.

Request a Quote

Did you know?

AWS and Azure pricing can change every month affecting your monthly billing. By choosing igroup, your pricing is capped for the duration of your 1, 2 or 3-year contract, eliminating spikes in your billing.

SharePoint Hosting

If your business is using versions of SharePoint other than Online, the configuration of your server farm is probably the biggest contributor to performance. At igroup we are cloud specialists who offer a range of SharePoint hosting solutions based on Microsoft Azure and AWS that can increase both security and stability for end users while also offering the best possible performance.

The way in which your servers are configured to host SharePoint requires planning. During the process of creating a specification, igroup’s technical consultants will need to consider a variety of factors including the number of users you have, the way in which you use and set up SharePoint and the amount of data that you store.

Factors that Affect Hosting Performance

Even if the correct types of server are used for the different aspects of SharePoint, this still does not guarantee that the performance achieved will be everything that you expect. There are multiple factors that affect the performance of your SharePoint hosting including:

Data Storage

The amount of data stored by modern businesses is huge. Aside from documents that are used in day to day work, most businesses also accumulate large amounts of data that measures different areas of performance. A common issue that faces businesses using SharePoint is that the amount of data they hold is much larger than anticipated. This can have a substantial effect on performance – the database servers may not be sufficiently large, and the server which hosts the indexing software that manages search may not be powerful enough to handle the volume of data.

This can manifest itself in slow retrieval performance or information not being available.

User Numbers

The number of people who use your SharePoint application at any given time can vary. In smaller organisations, the number of connections may never be large, but for multinational businesses with thousands of staff, user volume can seriously affect the speed with which the application can run if the servers handling requests are not powerful enough.

This is a key factor that should be considered during the architecture process.

Choosing the Right SharePoint Hosting

For versions of the software such as SharePoint 2019, there are 3 main choices that an organisation has about how they build and develop their SharePoint farm.

Hosting SharePoint on Physical Hardware

Traditionally many businesses used physical servers in a datacentre to host SharePoint. This is often called an on-premises hosting solution. The advantage of this is that you have total control over the environment and own it. However, there are numerous disadvantages which are often difficult to resolve. Perhaps the most common issue faced is that if something goes wrong – such as a machine failing – it can mean significant downtime, particularly if it takes a long time to replace the hardware.

SharePoint Cloud Hosting

A different option is to migrate SharePoint to a cloud hosting environment such as Microsoft Azure or AWS. Properly managed, the cloud offers many benefits over a physical hosting solution. Most notable of these advantages is the flexibility that the cloud brings. It’s possible to reconfigure your SharePoint hosting farm quickly to change the different types of machine that are used. With management software like igroup’s Cloud Control, this can be done in near real time to allow the SharePoint environment to be scaled depending on need. This means consistent performance with the ability to manage costs without compromising on peak performance.

Another key advantage of cloud hosting for SharePoint is that it provides the ability to back-up data regularly and without interruption. This means faster recovery in the event of an outage and much improved security.

Hybrid SharePoint Hosting

While SharePoint Cloud Hosting is the preferred option for most organisations, it is not always suitable for data storage. Compliance requirements about data storage in certain industries can preclude using a cloud hosting solution where the data may reside in a different country.

In these cases, the option may be to configure a hybrid solution whereby some elements of SharePoint such as the software itself is virtualised in the cloud while sensitive data is stored on a traditional server.

This can be the best of both worlds where data storage is a consideration, although it is essential that some back up mechanism is put in place for security and business continuity.

Igroup have worked with organisations of all sizes to provide world class SharePoint hosting with industry leading uptime and SLAs that improve performance while often reducing subscription costs. To speak to one of our cloud or SharePoint specialists, please contact us today on 0203 697 0302 or request a call back.