The hybrid cloud combines the ideas of both public cloud and private infrastructure. With hybrid cloud solutions, organizations link their private cloud infrastructure with that of the public cloud service providers. In this scenario, organizations can have data residing in either cloud and, in some cases, have the ability to shift data and services between environments.

Properly designed and implemented hybrid cloud environments can create a seamless experience for users. 

A common use of the hybrid cloud is to store non-sensitive data in a public cloud service while storing business-critical or sensitive customers in a private cloud infrastructure. Being able to use both of those services together can provide an advantage for organizations and can allow them to use the benefits of both cloud models. It's a model that can be used to save costs on general services (such as email) while introducing an organization to cloud services. The sensitive or critical line of business apps with more strict requirements can be kept on-premises or in a private cloud infrastructure until such time as a cloud model can meet business requirements.

If configured appropriately, organizations can slowly transition on-premises or private cloud workloads to a public cloud service with little or no service interruption. Organizations can also start new projects in a cloud service or platform and leave their legacy private cloud or on-premises infrastructure in place rather than migrating, letting it retire, or decommissioning it when it is no longer valuable or useful.

While being able to bridge the public and private cloud models has some advantages, it does introduce complexity. Having applications, services, or data split between two locations can introduce confusion and can be a disadvantage for hybrid cloud customers. This complexity can affect both the user and administration experiences, so it's important to architect hybrid cloud solutions in a way that directs users and administrators to the correct resources.

There are several examples of hybrid cloud solutions, such as when an organization is starting to use a cloud service such as Microsoft Teams for collaboration, but also continuing to store and manage documents using an on-premises SharePoint Server 2010 environment. In this scenario, users have to be aware of which data is stored in which service and how to navigate to each service, as there's no direct integration between them. Another example might be an organization that is slowly transitioning on-premises mailboxes to a service such as Microsoft Exchange Online. In this scenario, however, the experience has been designed to be seamless for end users. Whether they are using Microsoft Exchange Server on-premises or Exchange Online, their desktop client is able to locate the appropriate services behind the scenes. 

Now that we've now discussed the three different cloud deployment models (public, private, and hybrid), we can move on to the different types of cloud service scenarios.