Sky's The Limit for the Midmarket with Hybrid Cloud

When it comes to information technology, midmarket sized businesses tend to be torn between the cloud enthusiasm and a legacy system reality.

Today, startups are born leveraging cloud-based technology for operational, transactional, and productivity systems, such as NetSuite, Salesforce.com, and Microsoft Office 365. Startups have limited data history, cloud-savvy team members (millennials with devices), and no desire to maintain any type of information technology hardware, software, or FTEs.

On the other side of the marketplace spectrum, enterprise-sized businesses are under constant pressure by shareholders in search of efficiency and savings through innovation, which has led to a migration of public cloud providers, such as Microsoft Azure Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform.

Where does this leave companies in the midmarket? Midmarket companies characteristically have several legacy systems and departmental tools, lots of historical data and utilize a couple of full time IT staff members to manage it all.

These midmarket companies go through annual case of “analysis paralysis” by trying to justify the costs of moving towards the cloud (which is where everyone says they’re headed), while they “limp along” continuing to maintaining hardware, software licenses, and miscellaneous components.

These companies need to either adapt to new cloud platforms or they will simply continue to struggle to keep up with the latest in technology. It’s a battle of business transformation versus information technology status quo with antiquated processes.

The competition in the public cloud services space is becoming fierce and the pricing is becoming more reasonable for businesses to move in this direction. Over the past two years, Microsoft has completely reinvented itself into a cloud services company and is migrating many well-known businesses (Delta Airlines, NBC Universal, 3M just to name a few) on to its cloud platform, Microsoft Azure.

The good news is that the midmarket is in a unique position by being able to leverage a best-of-breed approach towards a system solution through a hybrid cloud strategy. A hybrid cloud strategy is based on a mixture of on premise, private cloud, and public cloud solutions all working together within a single technological ecosystem.

A hybrid cloud approach represents the best-next-first-step to implementing a cloud transformation strategy for midmarket sized business. A great example would be a midmarket sized business utilizing a local file server (on-premise), Enterprise Resource Planning (private cloud), Customer Relationship Management (public cloud), and Proprietary Systems (on-premise) all working together.

With the right hybrid cloud strategy, midmarket businesses have the ability to participate in the business transformation process, leverage the latest in technology, and be able to deploy a high level of technology that is virtually impossible for any midmarket business to duplicate in-house.

Midmarket business can continue to have enthusiasm for the cloud and work with the legacy system environment. In moving towards a hybrid cloud strategy, midmarket businesses will be able to put a scalable platform in place that will not only work to grow your company, but all increase your business success for many years to come. The sky's the limit for the midmarket with a hybrid cloud strategy.