There are some benefit and consideration if you move your sharepoint 2010 environment on cloud for your organizations. Let’s talk about the good bits first and then we will move towards the worries. J

Benefits: (why sharepoint should be on cloud)

Simplify SharePoint ownership

Managing SharePoint technically on premises is a big challenge, things like in house SharePoint upgrade, backup and recovery adds more cost into it. If you use cloud then you are actually transferring the sharepoint farm maintenance and availability to the cloud service providers.

Cloud is cheaper solution for some Organizations

The cost of hardware and training for in house SharePoint could be very high, especially for smaller organizations. The cloud approach makes SharePoint more affordable and easy to implement. I can say this will be a greater interest for smaller organizations.

Best for OOBT solutions

The cloud based SharePoint 2010 solution in small to medium sized businesses who mostly require out of the box (OOTB) features and functionality and departmental permission strategies.

Considerations (Reasons why SharePoint on cloud is not best in your case)

Site Customization problems

There are some doubts about using custom code solution on sharepoint server in the cloud. The big concern is the performance.

Business Connectivity Services lacking on cloud

At the moment sharepoint 2010 on cloud does not have support for “Business integration service called “Business Connectivity Services (BCS)”. This is a big cause for organizations to hold back cloud migration that is using BCS or intend to use BCS service in future.

Third Party Products & Solutions

If your organization is heavily relaying on third party solutions or products, you need to engage them to make sure that the solutions or product are fully tested on cloud before making a decision.

Note: This is really open to discuss, please add any comments and concerns and we all can understand it better.