Cloud-based products like Office 365 have been getting a lot of attention recently. For medium- to large-sized organizations, hybrid clouds — which involve some components in the cloud and others on-premises — are a fact of life and reality. Hybrid clouds will really take off this year, predicts an article from CMSWire that offers some tips on how companies can decide which approach is best for them.
The critical question is this: Which applications make the most sense to migrate to the cloud? For starters, look if there’s a proven online platform that also has an established development community so as an organization you have confidence that there will be continued support and innovation around that platform. A great early example of this was Salesforce.com, which through Force.com has thousands of developers throughout the world.
A similar analogy unfolding today around content and collaboration involves what Microsoft is doing with Office 365. Microsoft is making a significant commitment to the cloud, and that includes SharePoint. This allows CIOs to see a clear roadmap in which they’re able to get SharePoint online and well as the rest of the Office productivity solutions. They’re also starting to see how innovation is going to take place with a development community creating apps that are accessible within the SharePoint apps store, such as Nintex’s Workflow and Forms products now available for Office 365. Ultimately, they’re able to see a robust platform that’ll be able to support itself moving forward, and that’s critical for CIOs to feel confident about migrating to the cloud.
Many of the concerns about moving business-critical data and processes to the cloud relates to reliability and security. Service outages and stolen data are often in the news, and that leads some companies to keep their most sensitive content hosted internally. On the other hand, moving from purely on-premises solutions to a hybrid cloud can actually help alleviate “shadow IT,” which causes problems when users turn to cloud-based consumer tools because their company doesn’t provide similar functionality.
In the end, the decision about which cloud model to adopt and which applications to move to the cloud ultimately depends on each organization’s unique situation.
Source: CMSWire, 2014
