A couple years ago, a friend of mine bought a brand new gas-guzzling SUV. Yet now that the price of gas is shooting up at the pump, he really wishes he had bought a Toyota Prius. There’s no easy way to convert his SUV into a hybrid vehicle. And if he trades his vehicle in for one that’s more fuel efficient, he’ll have lost a good chunk of his initial investment. Talk about buyer’s remorse.

Many organizations moving to the cloud face a similar dilemma. Some cloud vendors force you to take an all-or-nothing approach. You must either abandon your existing on-premises investment and migrate all of their workloads to the cloud, or you must keep all of your workloads on-premises, and lose out on all the benefits the cloud has to offer.

Microsoft has taken a more flexible approach – one that meets the needs of the majority of today’s enterprises. Some organizations may want to put all their data in the cloud. To that we say great. Yet many others have already invested thousands of dollars in on-premises infrastructures. For a variety of reasons, they may want to continue to leverage this investment, and move only some of their workloads to the cloud. To that we say great, too.

A hybrid approach enables enterprise businesses to move “commodity workloads” to the cloud – such as communication, messaging, and collaboration applications – freeing up IT administrators to focus on line-of-business applications that affect the bottom line. A hybrid approach also makes it cost-effective to bring more employees into the IT fold – by serving them in the cloud, while continuing to serve existing workers on-premises. With Microsoft, there are no ultimatums. You can migrate the workloads that are right for your business at the right time.

Even businesses in highly regulated industries can move some of their workloads to the cloud.  Microsoft has worked hard to develop enterprise-class security policies that keep an organization’s data protected, while making it possible to comply with even the strictest regulations.

Just like driving a hybrid vehicle, which combines a traditional gas engine with the power of an electric motor generator, a hybrid approach to the cloud combines an on-premises infrastructure with the power of the cloud. In both cases, users can leverage an existing investment – and extend it even further with new technology.

During the month of August, I’ll be discussing how a hybrid approach to the cloud addresses the needs of many of today’s enterprises. Specifically, I’ll focus on how Microsoft seamlessly integrates cloud-based services with on-premises applications. I’ll also showcase organizations that have adopted a hybrid model and explain why. And I’ll discuss the benefits of a hybrid approach based upon the specific security, compliance, and operational needs businesses face.

In the meantime, please share your feedback. Is your organization taking a hybrid approach to cloud computing? What considerations are you facing as you move to the cloud? We’d like to hear from you.