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Embracing Both the Old and the New

If you happen to have had the great opportunity to live through the 70s and 80s, you may remember when cartoons, such as Looney Tunes™, were only available early Saturday mornings (at least in the US it was that way). TV stations would shut down at midnight as they played the National Anthem and then it was just static until the morning news. Now we live in a 24/7 world where everything, including cartoons, news, and basically anything you can imagine, is on-demand!

The same could almost be said for how business has evolved over the decades. For so long, we’ve lived in an on-premises-only world, where all we had were data centers and physical peripherals on which to process and store our data. Now, we have the “magical cloud,” where things live… somewhere else, but we can still utilize and access them at any time – 24/7. The sense of mystery and wonder still exists, but more and more it is becoming our new normal, especially as physical hardware limits have essentially been removed.

With just a few clicks of our mouse, we can buy more tools to do more things and acquire more space to store all our digital stuff. All without having to ever install anything ourselves or maintain servers and update software. The digital transformation of enterprises – moving file storage, apps, and even critical systems like security from the traditional on-premises to the cloud – has already been well underway for some time now. The catalyst for all of this has come from the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, which has grown in popularity so well because it attains everything we need: cloud apps are usually faster to deploy, easier to maintain and cost less to implement. Need more capacity? Done. The elastic nature of the cloud can magically make that happen. Organizations are recognizing this, and have adopted cloud-first directives to take advantage of this new era.

With all the benefits that a cloud enterprise can experience, it’s no wonder that the cloud is moving from being a disruptor to the new norm. But for many, the legacy systems with which they started their business are still so ingrained in the foundation of how they work, becoming 100% cloud may never actually occur.

So, is that bad? Is the shadow of “the cloud” above our collective heads becoming too much of an obligation instead of an inspiration? Instead of looking to the cloud as a savior from the “bad” on-premises systems, we should instead be welcoming it as a complementary companion to them. Yes, some systems can – and should – be replaced by cloud applications. There’s no need for every company to maintain and run their own ticketing system, for instance, when apps such as ServiceNow exist.

The hybrid environment, at least for the foreseeable future, is here to stay for many enterprises. And that’s ok. It’s truly giving us the best of both worlds – where both options exist and organizations can benefit from choosing what works best for them. So, as we continue to evolve our on-demand and just-in-time worlds, we can still ensure we get to enjoy both. And for you Bugs Bunny fans, it’s available anytime too!


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