While cloud adoption is happening at a different pace in every organisation, the speed of adoption for the businesses Coeo works with is getting faster. However, they’re not all replacing all of their existing IT systems with new cloud services. Instead, many are integrating cloud services with their existing systems – combining the new world with the old world to create one universe – a hybrid cloud.

Adapting to cloud-only innovation

In the last year, Microsoft’s cloud data platform has increasingly taken a cloud-only focus. It’s using its global scale Azure platform to provide analytics and data storage capabilities that aren’t feasible for most businesses to deploy on-premises. Azure Data Lake, Azure Machine Learning and Power BI are just three examples of recent cloud-only Microsoft services that look like they’ll be critical tools in the evolution of a business’ analytics capabilities.

On-premises source data, cloud exploitation

As an example of building hybrid clouds, Coeo are now regularly helping businesses use cloud analytics services with on-premises transactional data. This is because most businesses still have most of their revenue generating systems on-premises and that’s probably not going to change for several years. The complexity, the risk and the investment related to moving them to the cloud often can’t be justified right now. But instead of ignoring cloud innovation, Coeo is increasingly working with businesses that extract data from their on-premises transactional systems and then load it into cloud based analytics systems designed for advanced workloads.

Transparent hybrid integration

Building a hybrid cloud is becoming easier for data platform teams thanks to the software data management gateways that Microsoft has created for some of its data services. Azure Data Factory, a cloud based data transformation service, uses a data management gateway to securely transfer data from on-premises database servers to cloud data stores. Power BI, the data visualisation service, uses a similar gateway to create its own secure network connections to refresh Power BI data sets with on-premises data. The days of virtual private networks and Azure Active Directory services just to get started are over, although businesses wanting to do more than transfer on-premises data obviously still have this prerequisite.

The era of one universe

Connect the on-premises world with the cloud world is the foundation for the next of technology platforms. Only a small few will migrate all of their services to the cloud fast enough to not need to use the two worlds together. However, the first steps towards creating one universe have become a lot easier for Microsoft data platform audiences.