As laws and regulations change, management philosophies shift, and technology continues its advance, how do you hedge today's on-premises data storage? In most cases, the answer is a form of container-based architecture. Whether you use Docker, Mesos, Kubernetes, or even a virtualization-based approach, the benefits apply. Containers often equate to agility, but they also increase portability. By building out services and data stores within containers, you can more easily move them all—or some of them at a time as part of your migration strategy—to the public cloud. Containers also provide flexibility in terms of maintaining a similar architecture across all your on-premises and cloud applications, but with the ability to customize rollouts in geographical regions.