Are Microsoft customers cooling on cloud concerns?

Organizations in most industries are less and less hesitant about the cloud as it continues to mature and cloud concerns are assuaged as the reliability of cloud platforms continues to increase. We're seeing a variety of industries see past cloud concerns and adopt the technology more rapidly. There are natural laggards in there such as the financial services industry and healthcare -- where data privacy, confidentiality and security concerns are paramount -- but we're seeing even those industries start to come along.

Hybrid cloud offers the opportunity to take advantage of scalable processing in the cloud while allowing data retention to follow whatever security and cloud or data sovereignty guidelines are needed. That's something that's very encouraging; companies can mix and match, storing their data in one place, processing it in another or accessing it in another. This could potentially address the security concerns a company has but could also offer the performance, scalability and flexibility that cloud processing brings.

We're seeing a much greater proportional increase in the amount of cloud-based CRM work compared to on-premises work. Microsoft cloud volume is up significantly. That's a further testament to the shifting trend.

On-premises isn't going to go away in the near future -- there will always be cases where the on-premises flexibility is important. But the objections and the emotional concerns around cloud are vanishing rapidly, and Microsoft remains in a unique position as its platform is able to migrate relatively easily between cloud and on-premises with a pretty similar code base between those environments.