Nearly every CIO or CTO has been faced with this question at some point in the past 5 years, or will be challenged soon: “When are we going to move to the Cloud?” For those that remember, the late nineties and early millennium years were faced with the proliferation of the use of a single lowercase letter, “e”. We witnessed the rise of new products and marketing campaigns from every type of organization each wanting to catch the Internet wave with the announcement of products like eBilling, eShopping, eGovernment, eDocuments, eToys, eCars, and eGroceries. What many consumers remember from this timeframe was that while there was a lot of marketing of a single lowercase letter, there was a distinct lack of business value from many of these cutting-edge solutions.
Fast forward to the year 2010, and a similar phenomenon began forming around the use of the word “Cloud” – Private Cloud, Public Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, Government Cloud, Community Cloud, etc. The list of options continues to grow every time a new marketing major graduates from the latest eUniversity. Every technology provider in the known universe is pitching a Cloud solution that can catapult the business to a competitive advantage by moving IT systems to the Cloud! For some organizations that is a true statement, but for many others, the reality of moving every core system to the Cloud is simultaneously terrifying and distracting to the entire Operations team. With the hype and marketing spin currently inflight, most CIOs and CTOs are only willing to place a limited selection of services in a Cloud provider model in order to gain some economy of scale without putting the overall business operations at risk. For many organizations, the first set of systems they consider will be electronic mail (Exchange), Instant Messaging and Collaboration (Lync), and Information Management workloads (SharePoint).
In this white paper, we will explore the common challenges that organizations face when considering the use of a Hybrid Cloud Delivery Model. Many times, the implementation timeline allows the team to overlook or be discouraged from investigating several key considerations that should impact the decision of whether an Office 365 Hybrid configuration is a good fit for your business objectives.
White Paper, authored by Joshua Grear, Ben Mead, and Adrian Romo – White Paper: Office 365 – Hybrid Environment Deployment Considerations.