The enterprise world is just now discovering what homelab people figured out years ago: renting compute you can own is a bad deal. We weren’t ahead of the curve. We just couldn’t afford to be wrong.

People hear “rural Georgia” and picture a guy fixing printers. The reality is a lot more complicated, and the gap between assumption and truth says more about the tech industry than it does about small towns.

Exchange Hybrid isn’t a migration strategy — it’s an architecture you move into and sometimes never leave. After 16 years managing it for a major health system, here’s what it actually looks like from the inside.