Most forward-thinking IT organizations have moved past responding and adapting to the COVID-19 economic shock (remote workforce, improving digital business processes, etc.). They’re now on to what Deloitte refers to as the “Thrive” stage of a crisis, where they prepare for and shape the “next normal” in a way that delivers competitive advantage.[1]
To get there, they’re modernizing apps and adopting hybrid cloud.
Hybrid cloud—a combination of private and public cloud IT environments with unified and consistent operations—is the cloud strategy of choice for 88 percent of enterprises according to Enterprise Strategy Group.[2]
But mixing various infrastructure environments and unifying a cloud operating model to deploy and manage workloads, requires capabilities at multiple layers in the infrastructure, operations, service, and app stack.
There is a lot to think about and get right. But the benefits of a unified hybrid cloud—or even extended to multiple public clouds—are significant:
- Rapid application delivery and observability
- Flexible and optimized consumption of IT services
- Improved operational and resource efficiency with consistent infrastructure and operations
In Hybrid Cloud: The Future Ready Reference Architecture for Modern Business, you get a conceptually simple hybrid cloud reference architecture that includes a layered model with recommended structures, IT capabilities, and service integrations to build a single-platform hybrid cloud solution.
The reference architecture is designed to support the three primary modes of application modernization (read about the rehost, replatform, and refactor modes in Kit Colbert’s blog on the Counterintuitively Fastest Path to App Modernization) and reduce the complexity that often creeps in as IT adds more to the heterogeneous mix of application architectures and deployment environments.
This great resource isn’t overtly commercial. But, it is from VMware. So, as you would expect, it includes a useful summary of how VMware Cloud Foundation™ can be used to implement the recommended architecture.
VMware customers planning for the end of the pandemic face many unique circumstances. They also have a variety of goals as they modernize applications and expand IT service capabilities—to full-stack HCI for data center modernization, or private cloud in combination with one or more public clouds. VMware lets you modernize at your own pace in a way that makes sense both for your specific current situation and to support your future goals.
Download the new reference architecture and learn more about how a hybrid cloud and a unified cloud operating model can help you get a jump on Future Ready Hybrid Cloud.
[1] Deloitte. “Workforce Strategies for Post-COVID Recovery.” 2020.
[2] Enterprise Strategy Group. “Exploring Hybrid Cloud Adoption and the Complexity of Securing East-West Traffic,” January 2020.
