The hybrid IT model can play an important role in your digital transformation and data management, and this includes hybrid Microsoft environments.  Simply stated, the hybrid IT strategy employs a mix that begins with resources in house. Nearly every organization has legacy on-premises computing resources.

The second ingredient is cloud platforms. Public cloud services have emerged to either supersede or augment enterprise technology. Your public and private cloud could rely on both an offsite and local data center. By the same token, your local data center could feed a cloud architecture as part of a disaster recovery strategy.

A classic example would be an enterprise computing environment that has long been using Microsoft Active Directory and Exchange cloud infrastructure. It could still have servers on-premises but it has, over time, moved most users to cloud-based Azure and Office 365 environments. Likewise, Amazon Web Services provide a scalable platform to both pay as you go while you hoard, protect, and use your proprietary data locally.

A total cloud migration doesn’t work for everyone

There are solid reasons for keeping servers and data on-premises and out of the cloud. Certainly, cloud providers at Microsoft and Amazon would like you to move your entire IT infrastructure into the public cloud, but that’s not a realistic option for most businesses.

The obstacles range from application compatibility to complications in data migration and storage. Yes, the cloud can provide agility and scalability, but running applications on what you already have just might be more cost effective and help you stay more secure and compliant.

The Hybrid IT environment is here to stay, but comes with baggage

So, the answer is often to use both cloud-based and in-house resources: i.e., hybrid IT. Hybrid IT comes with improvements as well as a new set of management problems. Here are 5 things everyone should know about hybrid IT:

1. Hybrid IT introduces complexity. What used to be in one data center or on-prem server now spans geographies, partners, hybrid cloud, legacy systems, and applications. Coordinating and managing a hodgepodge of systems connected (or disconnected) is clearly a challenge. Managing Office 365 without third-party solutions, for example, could require as many as 12 native tools, and those same tools cannot be used to manage legacy on-prem systems.
2. Hybrid IT could increase costs. IT management in a hybrid environment is often divided into silos defined by computing platforms that require multiple teams and tools. If a unified approach can’t be found, costs of management – in terms of time, money and security risk — increase accordingly.
3. Hybrid IT creates a speed bump. Traditional IT doesn’t move as fast, often weighed down by well-intentioned processes to protect core business services. This speed differential between transformational and traditional IT systems can delay the delivery of digital business services because services sourced from the cloud often depend on traditional systems.
4. Hybrid IT can be an unexpected and unintentional outgrowth. Many hybrid IT environments are still happening “by accident,” without a strategic plan in place for selecting types of resources according to the requirements of the workload. It can also be about storage space and how/where to park all that big data to recover from disaster or stay compliant.
5. Nevertheless, hybrid IT Is the new normal. Today businesses are using the hybrid model like never before. For example, many businesses have end users that interact only with Office 365, including for email and Microsoft Teams, while senior IT staff continue to manage and maintain on-prem Active Directory and other technologies.

So, what now, and what’s next?

Legacy and physical data centers aren’t going away. If anything, they are consolidating and becoming a more capable and powerful hybrid IT infrastructure. And while computing options continue to increase, more than 60 percent of businesses indicate that hybrid IT solutions are now, and will be in the future, a significant part of their enterprise solutions.

IT teams who manage these complex, hybrid Microsoft environments should look at solutions like the Cayosoft Administrator, which is purpose-built for the hybrid IT world. Cayosoft Administrator delivers a single solution to automate and optimize day-to-day IT administration across Office 365 and on-prem environments, and can help your organization with the following:

• Simplify hybrid administration for the entire team
• Simplify licensing, reduce costs and avoid outages
• Eliminate costly, error-prone, manual user provisioning
• Keep groups accurate & up-to-date automatically
• Eliminate expensive support calls & improves service levels
• Make more-informed decisions with deep visibility

Cayosoft is the Solution

Simplify, secure, and unify your daily operations in a Microsoft hybrid deployment with Cayosoft Administrator. See how Cayosoft solves critical IT management problems across Active Directory, Exchange, Office 365, and Microsoft Teams. Request a demo or sign up for a free 25-day trial.