The Journey from On-Premises to Hybrid and Cloud

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, at Microsoft Ignite in Chicago last week, said, "Every company is a software company." What he meant was that every company must enhance collaboration and increase productivity at the same time, together. No easy task.

Why? Because today just about every company in the world is experiencing the fusion of collaboration (voice, chat, meetings) with productivity (business applications, workflow, and business intelligence). Each company is unique in the details of their business process and in the nature of their collaboration. Each company, therefore, needs a unique combination of software and platform, of cloud and on-premises, of custom and out-of-the-box.

Rich are the rewards to those who find a workable balance, an effective path as they maintain the known, stable on-premises systems and solutions that have worked so well for so long, on the one hand and the new, fast-changing "intelligent cloud" -- the infrastructure that powers mobility -- on the other.

At Microsoft Ignite in Chicago last week I came to fully appreciate that 80% of companies' IT infrastructure is "hybrid" and will be for at least the next 10 years.

I immediately recognized the challenges and opportunities this picture presents. The whole conference seemed to arrive at the understanding that "hybrid" is not a transition, it is not a temporary state you pass through on your way to cloud nirvana. Hybrid is the way it is now and the way it's going to be for a long, long time. So I gave myself the project -- during my five days and nights in Chicago -- of finding out what the road map looks like for companies and IT departments starting the journey into the hybrid world of cloud and on-premises together, of collaboration and productivity together.

The details of this journey from on-premises to hybrid and cloud are starting to emerge from my experiences helping customers migrate to Office 365, from breakout sessions at Ignite, and from my conversations with clients, IT professionals, and MVPs. The road map of this journey looks like this:

• The journey actually started a several years ago with salesforce.com and accelerated when uses started using box.com and dropbox, often without the knowledge or approval of IT. 
• The next step, very often, is Azure Active Directory, the foundation for Exchange Online and Office 365.
• Synchronization between on-premises Active Directory and Azure Active Directory establishes your foothold in the cloud. It makes single sign-on possible.
• Exchange online is typically the next step and the first of the previously on-premises platforms to be migrated to the cloud. The business case is strongest because risk is small and E-mail is like plumbing: a foundation with little customization
• Midway into the cloud, many customers start using Office 365. Few though, can go 100% to SharePoint online right away because legacy investments in SharePoint on-premises solutions (full trust code) take time to rewrite.
• OneDrive, Yammer, Power BI, and Delve start to deliver huge value to the organization. All four applications are cloud-only.
• Around this point in the journey, MySites can be migrated to Office 365 to great benefit. Often MySites are easier to migrate than SharePoint project sites and customized sites because MySites typically have little or no customizations. 
• Enterprise Search is a huge workload that, while very advantageous to move to the cloud, can require a lot of work to move. Infrastructure headaches with on-premises Search make this a compelling step, but there are multiple technical challenges to ensure your cloud-based search can securely crawl the on-premises content you cannot migrate to the cloud.
• Team sites and sites with little or no branding or customization can be migrated to the cloud with benefits for the mobile and global workers. 
• Late in the game -- deep into the hybrid/cloud journey -- come the migrations of complex, mission-critical custom applications developed using SharePoint full-trust code. These solutions require a complete re-write into the new Cloud App Model (SharePoint-hosted apps and Provider-hosted apps). While all new SharePoint custom development should be designed to conform to the Cloud App Model, legacy SharePoint solutions will have to be replaced or re-written before organizations can get rid of their last on-premises SharePoint server.

This journey through the hybrid cloud is ripe with challenges and will require constant re-evaluation. My mission, my passion, is to help my clients with the journey through the hybrid cloud, to create business solutions that address these challenges, to bring collaboration and productivity together in a world where users make their own choices -- with their own devices -- while IT professionals exert just enough governance and control to keep the enterprise secure.