Unlike purely cloud-based platforms, a hybrid cloud environment combines cloud solutions and your on-premises IT resources.
In a sense, this hybrid digital workplace might seem like a step backward or an awkward compromise. After all, if cloud computing offers such significant cost and efficiency benefits for today’s organizations, what’s the advantage of retaining some on-premises data and infrastructure?
The trend of adopting hybrid solutions is due in part to companies seeking to customize cloud technology to meet their specific business needs. But market forces in IT also play a significant role in the popularity of hybrid solutions.
Let’s look back a few years to when cloud technologies first started becoming popular in business settings. Initially, cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) products were touted as completely separate entities. The selling point was that SaaS tools could be used independently, without being connected to a company’s internal systems.
Today, many companies are using the cloud’s infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) as a way to move their physical servers to a cloud provider that then hosts and maintains the servers as a cloud network. Others use the SaaS model for specific purposes, such as content management, customer relationship management and marketing coordination (CRM systems, such as Salesforce.com), managing contracts, and large volume purchasing of products and services.
As adoption increased for these tools, however, users began demanding connectivity between cloud and on-premises tools, at least at the level of authentication. Instead of requiring business users to juggle multiple passwords for all of their SaaS platforms, they wanted to allow users to use a single password, with the on-premises system providing authentication. The goal in this scenario was to improve efficiency and also password security in the digital workplace. Organizations didn’t want people using multiple passwords in ways that didn’t follow corporate security standards.
That move to integrate cloud and on-premises systems opened the floodgates. Now, organizations wanted to know why one cloud service couldn’t connect to another, and why a cloud service can’t connect to their internal systems. This forced cloud providers to recognize that one-size-fits-all isn’t a satisfactory solution for many organizations, and they started introducing methods for connecting these systems, giving organizations the option to pick and choose the best solution for the right people at the current time.
In addition, major IT companies like Microsoft are intensely focused on building the cloud market and moving their own solutions to the cloud, because it’s beneficial for them. The cloud allows Microsoft to manage its solutions without worrying about multiple versions of the same software. But if its user base is using a wide variety of different tools, it introduces major support issues and increases the costs of technology fixes.
To sum it up, hybrid solutions aren’t a step back from the cloud so much as they represent a greater potential for customization in the digital workplace. A variety of external market forces combined to push business solutions to the cloud, and now those forces are pushing cloud providers to allow for combinations of services via hybrid solutions.
To learn more about using hybrid cloud technology to drive productivity in your digital workplace, download our new white paper, “When A Hybrid Environment Might Be The Best Solution.”
