Microsoft Partner Briefing has been doing the rounds of the country and as usual Cloud strategy was on the agenda of every presentation. However, whereas before it seemed more aspirational (head in the cloud?!) than practical, the refined vision of a hybrid offering actually sounds feasible.
So now we have SaaS, PaaS and IaaS to pick and choose from to form the hybrid solution. SaaS is Software as a Service, for example consuming Office365, CRM Online or other applications as web services rather than installing the software locally. PaaS is Platform as a Service and this is where Microsoft is looking to gain share with Azure. Finally IaaS, Infrastructure as a Service, is where all is up in the Cloud. HyperV technology (Virtualisation that makes it possible, somehow, to hold 10 terabytes of data on a one terabyte drive!) makes it feasible for large data centres to manage information for a multitude of businesses.
I’m not sure how ready we are to send business critical financial information off site and high profile media stories of failures and outages will help fuel the reluctance. However, a Hybrid approach makes sense, outsourcing the non-critical to focus internal resources on the systems that give your business its competitive edge. For Dynamics NAV users this could be a scenario where the SQL database and NAV application are kept on premise but Office solutions and additional services such as postcode look-ups, credit control applications and credit card processing are all pulled as SaaS i.e. from the Cloud.
For credit card processing there are clear advantages of using a Cloud service as it means that the service provider is the one managing the stringent security associated with processing such payments. The NAV process would be to call the service and then await the confirmation that payment had been approved.
Cloud, whether full or Hybrid, is a response to the changing dynamics of how we manage our workload, workstyle and workspace. We all connect to the Internet practically daily, we may not be sat at a desk in the office so frequently. Using the mechanism we daily hook into as the medium for updating our machines and consuming our applications makes absolute sense to how we live our lives.
