In contrast to hybrid work is flexible work, sometimes known as flex time. Flexible work is a policy that allows individual employees to choose when and often where they work. As with the hybrid model, employees in a flexible model often divide their work time between the office and their homes. However, the difference is that the employee—not the employer—controls the schedule. Within certain constraints, employees are free to decide when they want to be (or have to be) in the office and when they prefer to work from home.
Flexible work might sound like a recipe for chaos, and it probably would be for some companies and jobs. Maintaining a hybrid schedule and knowing where employees are at any particular time can be a huge problem. However, the Microsoft 365 collaboration tools are designed for precisely those situations. Microsoft Teams, in particular, can provide employees with access to the applications and data they need as well as collaborative communications wherever they happen to be on the Internet.
Summary
- Cloud computing can provide organizations with many benefits, including economy scalability, reliability, manageability, and security.
- There are three cloud service models—IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, which specify how much of the resource management is the responsibility of the cloud provider and how much is the responsibility of the subscriber.
- There are three basic cloud architectures:
- Public Cloud resources are furnished by a third-party provider on the Internet.
- Private An organization provides its own cloud resources.
- Hybrid The public and private architectures are combined.
- Cloud-based collaboration tools like those in Microsoft 365 facilitate modern workforce models, such as hybrid and flexible work.
Thought experiment
In this thought experiment, demonstrate your skills and knowledge of the topics covered in this chapter. You can find answers to this thought experiment in the next section.
Wingtip Toys has a website on which they sell their products to customers worldwide; it is the company’s primary source of sales. The website is hosted on a server farm in the company’s datacenter, which is a small room in the building’s basement. The incoming traffic is distributed among the servers by a load-balancing switch. Richard, the site administrator, regularly monitors the website traffic, and as the holiday season approaches, he sees the traffic level rise almost to the point at which the servers are overwhelmed.
There is no budget for the purchase of additional web server computers and no room for more servers in the datacenter. Reading about cloud options, Richard thinks that there might be a solution there. How can Richard expand the web server farm to handle the increased traffic for the least expense by using the cloud?
Thought experiment answer
For a minimal expenditure, Richard can create additional web servers using cloud-based virtual machines and add them to his web server farm, forming a hybrid cloud architecture. The cloud-based servers can help to handle the busy season web traffic, and when the traffic levels go down, Richard can remove the VMs from the server farm until they are needed again.