Cloud solutions are increasingly popular in today’s digital workplaces, but most of them aren’t well-suited to specialized needs and industry niches.
For many companies, a hybrid cloud environment combines the cost savings of the cloud as well as ways to optimize technology and IT investments in order to solve specific problems and reach specific goals.
Before you take the plunge with a hybrid digital workplace, there are a few key factors to consider: your regulatory environment, your ability to continue investing in new technology and the integration possibilities of your existing systems.
Many organizations have regulatory and compliance requirements that make a hybrid solution a good choice. That includes companies in the pharmaceuticals industry, the financial sector and businesses that have government or self-regulation requirements that specify how certain types of information need to be managed.
The country where you store your information is also a factor in many cases. If you’ve chosen a cloud solution provider that hosts its solutions in Europe, for example, you may need to use a hybrid option to remain in compliance.
If you’re in an industry with regulatory and compliance requirements, you could solve these issues with two separate content management environments meant for different uses. For collaboration and everyday, non-regulated work between departments, you might use the cloud-based SharePoint Online within Office 365. Then, you could use a SharePoint on-premises solution for content management that needs to remain internal.
Combining these two platforms in a hybrid solution allows you to give your users a single experience for searching and finding documents. If you do some customization on the navigation, it’s possible for users to go back and forth between these environments in a seamless manner. As a result, you get the value of both the cloud and the hybrid solution.
Similarly, if your email is subject to regulation, there’s an opportunity to have part of your toolset kept in the cloud and part of it kept internal. Again, you’re able to put the appropriate information in the appropriate places, while still getting the major benefits of the cloud’s scalability and access to new features.
Another factor to consider is your ability to continue investing in additional features, such as mobile applications. Many organizations don’t have the budget or capability to develop their own mobile apps in the future. With a productivity solution like Office 365, that need to continue building your technology platform falls to Microsoft, not you.
Office 365 provides mobile solutions across all mobile operations systems, allowing your business users to access the productivity suite and view and edit documents anywhere at any time. This is a great way to improve the usability of your systems without the need to make additional investments in development.
Finally, if your organization currently uses multiple IT ecosystems, you have to go through authentication hurdles to connect those systems and provide a streamlined experience for business users. On the other hand, if you’ve decided on one cloud-based ecosystem, such as Salesforce.com or Office 365 and their partner systems, you may have integration points that only work in the cloud. A hybrid solution could help you bring these cloud capabilities down into your on-premises systems.
In the end, a hybrid environment connects cloud-based and on-premises IT infrastructure to help you get the benefits of both platforms. To determine whether this type of digital workplace is right for your company, it’s important to consider your regulatory environment, technology investment strategy and your existing systems’ integration potential.
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.”
