Who would have thought that a mail order retail company would revolutionize how organizations make IT decisions? Who would have thought that an online search tool would define how schools and universities communicate with their staff and students? Who would have thought that a mobile app would turn taxi cab providers upside down? The Cloud can be defined in many different ways by various IT professionals, and one thing is for sure: It’s here to stay, and it’s growing like never before.

The large majority of enterprise, commercial, government and mid-market organizations utilize Microsoft Office in one way or another. These same organizations are feeling the pressure to reduce costs and become more agile. One way to accomplish this is to move people (i.e. mailboxes), processes (billing, HR, compliance), and production (design work, automation, build) to the Cloud.

The mobile workforce is allowing employees to work anywhere, anytime, and on any device. What’s powering this workforce transformation? You guessed it, the Cloud. For example, Microsoft has been working hard over the past several years to introduce products like Office 365, SharePoint, and One Drive – all hosted on Azure, Microsoft’s cloud offering. Customers now need to determine what workloads they want to put into a cloud provider like Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), or other offerings like VirtuStream by DELL EMC. Or do they want to take the time to build their own internal private cloud?

Before, companies saw IT as a part of their business; now, they are quickly learning IT IS the BUSINESS! Most organizations know that diversity is the best way to approach this, especially from a risk standpoint. What we are seeing is a hybrid approach to a cloud strategy. Not necessarily a “Hybrid Cloud” per se, but a little bit of data and business process spread across multiple cloud providers.