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Chapter 3: IT's All about the Workloads 23 These materials are © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. In addition to lamenting about latency, as you throw more networks between the user and an application, the likelihood of a network outage increases, which would bring down that service. Performance and reliability are the lynchpins to successful IT. If you have a highly centralized workforce in a single build- ing or a single campus, keeping workloads close by might make more sense. If, however, you have a highly distributed workforce and your users are mostly remote or you're a web application company, centralizing some key applications in the cloud could make sense, but you have to ensure that you don't damage performance and reliability by doing so. Defining the right mix of infrastructure: Public, private, traditional The right mix of infrastructure is different for every company, but it will include some combination of public cloud and on‐premises infrastructure. In addition to application archi- tecture and latency and network concerns, you also need to consider such factors as ease of support and cost to run a workload. Using Office 365 as an example, you may find it less expensive and less frustrating to move to Office 365 than to retain Exchange locally. If you've done that or you're consid- ering such a move, you know that you went through a litany of checklist items before you made that fateful decision. And that was for just a single application, albeit a big one. Now, as you consider your future hybrid IT strategy, you need to repeat that process for each and every application in your portfolio. It may sound daunting, but it's a worthwhile exercise. Understanding Workload Locality Workload and data locality are among the biggest decisions you have to make when you're trying to decide which applications should live locally and which ones should live in the cloud.