A hybrid world

This month, Ben Weissman (@bweissman) challenges us to write about hybrid solutions. He says:

It has become pretty evident to me, that we’ll be living in a hybrid world for a long time – potentially indefinitely.

Ben Weissman

, and this is what I want to address in this post.

I like what Ben says here because for a long time it felt like hybrid was only the domain of the partially migrated. For those organisations that had dabbled with the cloud but weren’t prepared to commit. A halfway house for people who were on the journey towards being in the cloud, but who had a few things they weren’t prepared to give up.

In some ways, I suspect this is actually the rationale behind hybrid solutions like Azure Arc. There are many organisations who like the features that Azure offers, but simply aren’t prepared to have their data in the cloud. It’s a stance I’ve seen many times, although with multiple Azure data regions in Australia now, the reluctance to the cloud is not what it was.

Power BI has also caused organisations to have some amount of data in the cloud even if their data still resides on-site. And course, this leads to the situation where they push data into cloud storage to make refreshes easier.

I agree with Ben. I think many organisations will continue to have a large amount of their data within their own data centres for a long time yet. As much as I like the idea of everyone moving fully to the cloud, there might always be reasons why that’s not practical. And so hybrid solutions will continue to improve. Azure Arc is an excellent example of how to think smarter around hybrid, so that some of the benefits of Azure can be realised without the need to compromise on having data in external data centres.

As was discussed last month, technology keeps moving on, and the features available in a cloud-only world are developing quicker than ever. But hybrid is one of the ways to make sure that people aren’t left behind, and I really like the fact that hybrid is such a strong story.