Strategic Analysis of Moving EA’s SharePoint Instances to the Cloud

This is a very tough time in the gaming industry as video game sales have decreased with a slowdown in the global economy. Electronic Arts (EA) is focusing on keeping costs down in all aspects of the business. Two of the key strategies for EA’s IT department are to keep costs down and to adopt the cloud where possible. This paper investigates the possible cost savings, and other related factors involved in migrating EA’s SharePoint instances to the cloud. Although the human resource, license, and infrastructure costs would be saved, other factors were uncovered that would require months of further technical research in order to make a clear recommendation. Specifically some SharePoint sites are heavily customized and many customizations are not supported in the cloud. Also, EA is one of the most hacked companies in the world, and having data stored off site is a huge security risk. Therefore the recommendation is not to adopt SharePoint in the cloud at this point, and a more accurate recommendation can be put forth when this technical research is completed.