Many organizations are making the move to the cloud with Microsoft Office 365. However, some are not yet ready to entirely transfer their workloads to the cloud. There may be numerous reasons behind this, including organization readiness, security, and compliance. In this chapter, you will explore the term “hybrid,” the need for a hybrid environment, some real-world use cases of hybrid implementations, and ways to determine if is it the right choice for your organization. The term “hybrid” means that you will get the benefits of both environments (on-premises and cloud).
Hybrid is not a “must” implementation. It will enable you to extend your on-premises workloads to the cloud.
The Term Hybrid
A hybrid environment Image source: docs.microsoft.com
Hybrids offer the best of both worlds. A SharePoint hybrid deployment is a connection between the SharePoint farm (on-premises) and Office 365 (cloud). The SharePoint farm can be hosted in your own data center, private cloud, or public cloud (MS Azure or AWS). A hybrid environment enables business users to have the greater control they need on-premises and to use the latest and greatest features in the cloud.
Need for Hybrid Environment
You might not need a hybrid environment as a common scenario. However, the following are scenarios for a hybrid environment.
Scenario 1: A phased migration approach
For any organization starting their journey to the cloud, it may not be just a lift-and-shift operation. The journey to the cloud requires a phased approach to decide the migration artifacts and carry out the actual migration. Because of several factors, including the amount of data to migrate to the cloud, complexities of the solution, and business decisions, it isn’t feasible to perform the migration at one go.
In a situation like this, a hybrid environment helps to design a phased migration approach by moving the content to the cloud at your own pace and, at the same time, providing users the benefits of both environments.
Scenario 2: Leveraging existing on-premises investments
For organizations that already have huge investments in on-premises infrastructure but want to take advantage of the latest and greatest features of the cloud, a hybrid approach is a good choice.
Scenario 3: Customizations that cannot be completed in the cloud
Although the cloud provides the latest and greatest features, it offers less control than being on-premises. Due to this, some customizations cannot be completed in the cloud. Hybrid overcomes this limitation by allowing you to keep your workloads on-premises and extend other workloads to the cloud.
Scenario 4: You do not want to put some data in the cloud
Organizations care about their data. Although the cloud (or, in general, Office 365) offers all regulatory compliance solutions by implementing GDPR, multi-geo tenancy, and so on, organizations may be hesitant to move confidential data to the cloud. A hybrid approach allows that data to stay on-premises and still get the benefits of the cloud.
Benefits of Hybrid Deployments
Hybrid deployments integrate functionality and access between multiple features and services of both environments so that you can get the best of both worlds.
Control: The key benefit of a hybrid deployment is the degree of control offered. Organizations can customize the private end of the hybrid cloud to their business needs.
Security: With a hybrid environment, organizations can take advantage of the security of on-premises along with the services of the cloud.
Scalability: With a hybrid deployment model, business-critical data can continue to reside on-premises but can leverage the extensive power of the cloud to effectively increase the operational capacity.
Integrated platforms for workloads: The integrated platforms help things get done faster. You can add features to on-premises content with better control and also benefit from cloud offerings.
Hybrid Architecture
SharePoint on-premises farm
Office 365 license
MS Azure subscription
Directory federation via ADFS and Azure AD sync
Secured communication channels
Hybrid architecture Image source: docs.microsoft.com
The important thing is to set up Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) to securely share information. The single sign-on (SSO) is also handled through this.
Azure Active Directory (AAD) handles the authentication to Office 365, which also offers multi-factor authentication (MFA) and identity management. Since authentication happens via Azure AD, you must copy all of the organization’s user accounts to it.
Azure Access control services handle user authentication and authorization to the web application and services.
Moving to a Hybrid Environment with SharePoint Server 2019
Microsoft has framed SharePoint Server 2019 as a “whole new generation of SharePoint.” For many organizations, complex regulatory and compliance requirements make it very difficult to move their workloads to the cloud. At the same time, heavy on-premises customizations and limitations of moving the code solutions to the cloud make organizations deploy hybrid environments.
SharePoint Server 2019 offers an easy steppingstone for SharePoint-based organizations to move their workloads to the cloud. SharePoint Server 2019 eases this pain by acting as a middle ground for on-premises solutions because it offers many benefits of the cloud (SharePoint Online) as well as more control and compliance by staying on-premises.
SharePoint Server 2019 Hybrid Features
Hybrid app launcher: The hybrid app launcher modifies the SharePoint Server 2019 on-premises app launcher to be in synchronization with the app launcher in Office 365.
Hybrid sites: The hybrid sites allow users’ followed sites in both SharePoint Server 2019 on-premises and SharePoint Online to be displayed in a consolidated location, such as SharePoint home in Office 365.
Hybrid OneDrive for Business: The hybrid OneDrive for Business, once enabled, allows you to create a user’s OneDrive for Business in Office 365 instead of SharePoint Server 2019 on-premises.
Hybrid self-service site creation: The hybrid self-service site creation allows redirection of the default self-service site creation page in SharePoint Server 2019 on-premises to SharePoint Online.
Hybrid auditing: Hybrid auditing allows SharePoint administrators to push SharePoint Server 2019 on-premises audit logs to Office 365 unified audit logs.
Hybrid taxonomy and content types: This feature allows for shared taxonomy and content types across SharePoint Server 2019 on-premises and SharePoint Online.
Hybrid business connectivity services: This feature allows you to securely display data from an external system (e.g. SQL Server DB) without the need to connect to an on-premises environment.
Hybrid search: This feature allows you to display search results from both on-premises and cloud environments in a single, consolidated place.
Power Platform support: Using the on-premises data gateway, you can create Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI applications that can connect to on-premises content.
Conclusion
A SharePoint hybrid deployment is a connection between the SharePoint farm (on-premises) and Office 365 (in the cloud). A hybrid deployment integrates functionality and access between multiple features and services of both environments so that you can get the best of both worlds.
In the next chapter, we will cover how to set up a SharePoint Server 2019 developer VM in MS Azure.