Office 365 Hybrid Deployment: Enjoy the Best of Both Worlds!

With a Hybrid environment, you get the option of continuing to use Exchange mail like an on-premise user and remote workers will be able to access Office 365 web interface. However, with a hybrid deployment, the domains will remain the same for both instances!

IT professionals may want to configure a hybrid environment in order to understand and make sure how Office 365 would be useful for their organization. It is an intermediate step to move altogether to an Exchange Online organization. Hybrid environment/Hybrid configuration describes relationship between Exchange On-Premise infrastructure and Exchange Online infrastructure on the cloud!

Today, more organizations are embracing Microsoft's cloud offerings. This is because it is cost-effective, gives you freedom to access important business data from anywhere and enhances collaboration.

Hybrid Deployments: Why are they Needed

Business organizations using Exchange, SharePoint and Lync with on-premise deployment need to keep a part of this environment running when getting their services migrated to the cloud. This is to check on compatibility issues with existing applications or it may be a viable business decision to keep certain functions on-premises.

In a hybrid environment, you actually mix on-premise Exchange Mail with Office 365 use. If you do not intend to move all mailboxes to the cloud, you can decide to maintain Exchange servers. Business goals have to be taken into consideration and specific needs of your enterprise too need to be understood for the same.

Also, you need to have some prerequisites in place, for instance, there may be need to upgrade the on-premise environment before going hybrid. You also have to select the right plan, for example, one that supports Azure Active Directory synchronization.

How to Decide between Hybrid or Totally on the Cloud

In a Hybrid environment, the on-premise Exchange Server installation co-exists with Exchange Online meant primarily for SMB's (Small and Medium Businesses) and which comes with the Office 365 cloud offering.

A staged Exchange migration is meant for large business enterprises that decide to migrate mailboxes to the cloud overtime, that is, maintain some mail boxes on-premises while migrate the others to the cloud by means of directory synchronization! However, such organizations later move all Exchange mailboxes to the cloud. With older versions of Exchange, IMAP e-mail migration or III-Party solution would be needed. 

Benefits of Office 365 Hybrid Migration

Advantages of Hybrid Exchange Deployment:

• Important business data can be hosted on-premise while users could be relocated on inexpensive cloud servers (for legal jurisdiction of data).
• Exchange Online Archiving (EOA) services can be utilized with a Hybrid environment resulting in 99.9% uptime, 24x7 support and easy access to e-mail archives by users from their Inbox.
• Hybrid deployment is an intermediate step taken by enterprises before decommissioning an on-premise Exchange in order to totally switch over to Exchange Online.
• It also aids in 'off boarding', that is, moving back mailboxes to on-premises from Exchange Online!
• Migrations in and out of the cloud are transparent to the end-user.

Let your enterprise enjoy a seamless interaction between on-premises and cloud mailboxes. Time to work together as a seamless business organization with Office 365 Hybrid Deployment!