I’ve attempted to locate a manager or company willing to commit to the pretense of corporate push-back against a Hybrid mentality. I’ve had many conversations with customers who’ve had this struggle within their organizations, but few willing to go on record.

As a result, I’m going to relate a couple stories I’d experienced, but I’m not going to be able to commit customer references to this.

Let’s start with an organization I’ve had a lot of work with recently. They have much data, of an unstructured type, and our goal was to arrive at an inexpensive “SMB 3.0+” format of storage that would satisfy this need, amongst those approaches we’d recommended had been a number of cloud providers, both hybrid and public. The push-back came to them from their security team, who’d decided upon compliance issues as the barrier to going toward Hybrid. Obviously, most compliance issues have been addressed. In the case of this company, we, as a consultative organization, were able to make a good case for both the storage of the data, the costs, and an object based model for access from their disparate domains. As it turned out, this particular customer chose a solution wherein a compliant piece of storage was placed on premises which could satisfy the needs, but as a result of the research we’d submitted for them, their security team agreed to be more open in the future to these types of solutions.

Another customer had a desire to launch a new MRP application, and were evaluating the hosting of the application in a hybrid mode. In this case, the customer had a particular issue with relying on the application being hosted entirely offsite. As a result, we’d architected a solution wherein the off-prem components were designed to augment the physical/virtual architecture built for them on-site. This was a hugely robust solution that ensured a guarantee of uptime for the environment with a highly available approach toward application uptime and failover. In this case, just what the customer had requested. The pushback in this solution wasn’t one of compliance, as the hosted portion of the application would lean on our highly available, and compliant data center for hosting. The cost of the solution was their objection. Seemed to us to be a reversal of their original mandate. We’d provided a solution based on their requests, but they changed that request drastically. In their ultimate approach, they chose to host the entire application suite in a hosted environment. Their choice to move toward a cloudy environment for the application, in this case, was an objection to the costs of their original desired approach.

Most of these objections were real-world, and decisions that our customers had sought. They’d faced issues they had not been entirely sure achievable. In these cases either security or costs. I had hoped we’d delivered solutions that met the objections, and helped the customers to achieve their goals.

It’s clear that the push-back that we’d received were due to known or unknown real-world issues facing their business. In the case of the first customer, we’d been engaged to solve their issues regardless of objections, and we found them a storage solution that gave them the on-premise best solution for them. But in the latter, by promoting a solution that was geared toward satisfying all they’d requested, we were bypassed in favor of a lesser solution provided by the application vendor. You truly win some and lose some