Hoping to get into shape, a friend of mine recently decided to take up running. He had scheduled his first run at a local track over the weekend, and talked about it all day Friday at work. On Monday I asked him how it went.

 “I don’t think running’s for me,” he said, a dejected look on his face. “I used to be able to run a six-minute mile in high school. But now I’m so slow. Can you believe that it took me 11 minutes to run just one mile?  And after that I was too tired to go on!”

“It’s not how fast you run. Or how far – after all you’re not 18 anymore,” I told him. “If you just go at your own pace, you’ll get better in time. And you’ll be healthier and in better overall physical shape.”

My friend’s face lit up. “I know you’re right,” he said. “I can’t compare myself to what I could do in high school. The truth is if I just sit back and do nothing, I’ll never get into shape.”

My friend’s running experience can translate to many business scenarios and serves as an example of how some businesses may want to approach cloud computing. First, they should keep in mind their ultimate goal. And second, they should set their own pace in achieving it. A hybrid approach to the cloud, allows companies to accomplish both. Many companies initially choose to move some workloads to the cloud while keeping others on-premises so they can test the results and move at a pace that works for them.

Take hhpberlin, a fire-safety consultancy for large construction projects around the world. With five office locations in Germany, the company has experienced steady growth. hhpberlin had reduced IT costs by standardizing on a Microsoft environment that includes Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, and Microsoft Lync Server 2010.  Yet the company wanted to examine whether cloud-based services could help it lower costs even further.

Specifically, the company’s goals were to decrease IT costs, improve reliability of the infrastructure, and boost employee productivity, while still getting the most out of its existing on-premises environment. In the end, hhpberlin decided to move some of its workloads to the cloud but to go about it a little at a time.

Says Stefan Truthän, Chief Information Officer at hhpberlin: “Office 365 appeared to be the only hosted services solution that would allow us to transition services to the cloud at our own pace, while still taking advantage of all the great capabilities in Office 2010 and Microsoft server solutions that we already have in production.”

hhpberlin initially tested Microsoft Office 365 on 20 percent of its employees. Concluding that Office 365 would meet its long-term needs, the company will transition some of its Microsoft licenses from traditional volume licenses to an Office 365 subscription service plan that includes Office Professional Plus on the desktop. This arrangement will allow it to move to the cloud on its own schedule.

The company plans to move all of its employees to Exchange Online, while maintaining the benefits it receives from its on-premises SharePoint Server and Lync Server deployments. “The user experience is seamless when employees are working with Exchange Online in conjunction with on-premises solutions like SharePoint Server and Lync Server,” says Truthän. “Employees do not know whether they are in the cloud or not; and they don’t care, as long as it works.”

By keeping sight of its goals and proceeding at its own pace, hhpberlin is achieving concrete results. Truthän expects Office 365 to help the company lower costs by another 36 percent. It also expects Microsoft data centers to provide more robust security and reliability than what it could deliver itself, which will further boost employee productivity.

The company may either gradually or all at once transition its employees to SharePoint Online and Lync Online. Yet no matter how slowly or quickly it moves, IT staff will be able to keep the infrastructure running with little disruption to the day-to-day business.

For more details about hhpberlin’s move to the cloud, please read the full case study.

Also, please share your experience. What are your organization’s goals in moving to the cloud? Are you going at your own pace, and what does that involve?