{"id":5973,"date":"2015-06-04T12:00:37","date_gmt":"2015-06-04T11:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/?p=5973"},"modified":"2015-09-07T22:52:26","modified_gmt":"2015-09-07T21:52:26","slug":"office-365-and-the-hybrid-cloud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2015\/06\/office-365-and-the-hybrid-cloud.htm","title":{"rendered":"Office 365 and the hybrid cloud"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cloud, cloud, cloud. The buzzword of a few years ago is becoming reality for many organisations today but there are still some industries and use cases that have significant obstacles to overcome. Recent research from one hosting company<\/a> suggests that this is changing though \u2013 with public cloud usage set to double from 7% to 14% and hybrid cloud growth to almost triple from 10% to 28% over the next three years.<\/p>\n

\"\"Hybrid cloud is a term used to describe an architecture with elements of the solution provided from the public cloud (e.g. Microsoft Azure or Office 365) in conjunction with elements delivered on-premises (i.e. in a customer or managed service provider\u2019s datacentre).<\/p>\n

Whilst some cloud providers consider hybrid as little more than a tactical bridge<\/a> to help with transition to their infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) solutions, those using software as a service (SaaS) are really embracing a hybrid cloud as part of their architecture.<\/p>\n

For users of Microsoft\u2019s Office 365 productivity services, hybrid cloud offers some real opportunities, partly because the online services have grown from an established on-premises suite of software applications so the user experience with Exchange, Skype for Business or SharePoint is similar regardless of where the service is running.<\/p>\n

In this blog post, I\u2019m going to examine some of the scenarios where a hybrid cloud solution might be used with the common Office 365 workloads.<\/p>\n

Exchange Hybrid<\/h3>\n

Whilst Office 365 is highly configurable, it\u2019s not customisable. The Office 365 service descriptions<\/a> are fixed \u2013 that is to say that the service described is standard to all customers (unless they have a dedicated tenant) \u2013 and, whilst an administrator can change the configuration, certain levels of control require an on-premises infrastructure.<\/p>\n

For example, hosting mailboxes in the UK, installing tightly-coupled applications that need access to Exchange Servers, or anything that goes outside the boundary of the standard Exchange Online service would need on-premises Exchange servers to meet the requirements. However, if the restrictions that prevented all users from moving to the cloud only affected a portion of the organisation, there could still be advantages in moving other groups of users.<\/p>\n

A hybrid deployment provides a seamless look and feel of a single Exchange organization when there\u2019s actually two: an on-premises Exchange Server 2013 organization and Exchange Online in Office 365. Hybrid Exchange enables:<\/p>\n