SharePoint 2013 hybrid environment is the combination of On-Premise SharePoint server 2013 with Microsoft Share-Point On-line – Office 365. The objective of any hybridization of two related entities, is to exchange the strengths of both the entities which in turn reduces the weakness of its components. Hybrid environments are very beneficial for the organizations as it gives flexibility to choose between On-Premise or cloud model as per the requirement. Organizations can leverage the advantages associated with the use of flexible and fully customizable highly secured data governance of On-Premise system along with the cloud computing facilities to deliver perfect experience to the users.

Hybrid environments can be very helpful for the firms where complete migration to cloud is not possible due to technical or business related issues. Below are few common scenarios where hybrid environment can be very beneficial:

• Instant provisioning of new workloads on SharePoint On-line while maintaining the existing On-Premise SharePoint workload.
• Some organizations opt phased approach where they migrate from an existing on-premises environment to the cloud
• Organization wishing to use additional features or customization using On-Premise along with the cloud environment.
• Due to some compliance or data sovereignty reasons some firms wants certain data to be hosted in a particular locations.

A hybrid environment provides organization to preserve the amount which is invested on On-Premise SharePoint while allowing them to store some workload to the cloud. This will deliver the features they require to fulfill their requirement along with the flexibility and cost reductions they want. Hybrid SharePoint 2013 environments are likely to include:

• Active Directory Single-sign on – It gives the ability to the users to seemlessly authenticate across On-premises and SharePoint On-line environments
• Consistent user-interface with common site and document templates– It offers the easy navigation to the users and makes them familiar with the user interface across both the environments
• It also gives the freedom to deploy both Share-Point On-premise and Share-Point On-line as this hybrid environment gives a licensing model to them.

Hybrid environments allow organization to move at their own pace with the facility to move to cloud hosted SharePoint On-line. SharePoint on-line (office 365) makes it possible to implement such kind of hybrid environment. Designing this hybrid environment end to end will add complexity of your implementation which involves making the changes in terms of configuration to both the environment. As we all aware that there are some limitations associated with SharePoint but a well designed hybrid environment can reduce such limitations.