Navigating the Choices in a Hybrid World

The great thing about a hybrid cloud is that the environment allows you to select the right service for the right task. But, you might ask, how do I select the right balance of services from an architectural perspective? Think about the collection of requirements from a business perspective and match that perspective to an architectural approach.

In general, you want the platforms you select to be appropriate for the service level requirements of the business. If a portion of your environment requires real-time performance and guaranteed uptime, you will choose a public service with a sophisticated Quality of Service (QoS) or a completely private service that your company controls. For services such as customer relationship management, where availability and manageability are the most important business concerns, a SaaS environment makes business sense. From both an architectural and a business process perspective, you must decide which services need to interact with each other and which ones are, in essence, stand-alone services. In the end, you want to end up with a highly optimized environment that matches the needs of the customers that you need to support.