By moving your IT environment to the cloud or a hybrid cloud, you reduce or eliminate the need to maintain local infrastructure — a great opportunity to gain efficiency and reorganize your IT budget. But it’s important to stay focused on your business needs when making these decisions.
When you do improve IT, what is the specific benefit? How do you plan to refocus the department? Is a hybrid environment going to result in any loss in functionality? Fortunately, in most cases (and especially with Office 365), there is no noticeable loss in functionality for the end user.
Carefully consider each decision point:
- Clarify your business needs: Define the goal you plan to achieve as well as any known obstacles, such as regulatory or compliance concerns. Map out what information should go where in the hybrid solution. This way, if your business users experience any reductions in features or capabilities, you’ll be prepared to explain the long-term benefits of the hybrid solution.
- Clean up your data: Moving to a hybrid system is a great opportunity to clean up your current information and optimize the structure of that information. SharePoint Online is designed differently than the on-premises version, so it’s a good idea to assess whether you need to restructure site navigation and groupings before you migrate.
- Assess expectations for features: Here, the question is what users expect to get from their intranet or a collaboration platform, and whether those expectations are feasible for the cloud and on-premises systems. You want to get into specific details so that the decision maker is able to answer users’ questions and build checklists of desired features. These help to determine what content goes in which system, and makes it easier to move the content one direction or another as the cloud changes.
Tools For Migrating Data To A Hybrid Cloud
The number of tools and options available in the cloud are vast. To get a sense of what’s available for transitioning to hybrid, let’s talk about those that apply to Office 365. Many third-party vendors offer tools that assist with moving and upgrading from one version of Microsoft products to the next, and now they’ve expanded these tools to encompass the cloud-specific capabilities of Office 365.
There are a variety of tools that hook into different features of SharePoint Online and Microsoft-hosted Exchange email to take your information from wherever it is currently into the cloud environment. These tools come in three basic tiers:
- Migration-only tools: These excel at taking your data from one location and putting it in another, exactly as is.
- Migrating and transforming data: This next level of tools takes your data and transforms it to increase the usability and flexibility of your email or content management systems. During the migration, these tools might reorganize the data and possibly apply different attributes or metadata.
- Transition and administration tools: This third tier helps with the migration and data transformation, but also provides administration tools that work on top of those already provided by Microsoft.
In email, for example, these tools make it easy to monitor mailbox size and usage. In SharePoint Online, they make it easier to turn individual features on and off, and allow you to monitor the number of users, access, frequency of use and site size from a single administrator panel.
So when you’re looking at tools for transitioning to a hybrid environment, take the time to assess your current strengths and weaknesses in terms of administration, and choose a tool for the long term, not just for the transition. As the cloud and Office 365 improve, these tools also gain greater access to the core functionalities, so they’re able to provide even more value.
To learn more about the advantages of using hybrid cloud technology in your digital workplace, download our new white paper, “When A Hybrid Environment Might Be The Best Solution.”
