Digital transformation, innovating faster and modernizing IT portfolios are the leading factors driving greater public cloud adoption, followed by IT agility. According to Forrester, global public cloud market is expected to be $178B in 2018, up from $146B in 2017, growing at a 22% CAGR, and public cloud adoption in enterprises are expected to cross 50% for the first time. At VMware we have seen that even larger enterprises with well-established on-premises data centers are past the cloud experimental stage and are committing their operations to full production in the public cloud. We are seeing these large-scale migrations happening in virtually every industry from energy, healthcare, finance, manufacturing and retail to government, education, IT services and more.
But before reaping the benefits of cloud technology, businesses need to successfully move there. This is easier said than done. The first step is often the hardest which is making the decision to move to the cloud at all. IT teams are often faced with the prospect of learning new operations management tools and developing new processes, causing resistance to migrating applications to the cloud. Once the decision is made, complexity abounds as companies struggle to adapt and migrate applications to run in a cloud environment. Traditional migration practices involve a significant number of man hours, an assortment of tools and substantial risk, not to mention the actual time required to move from point A to point B. Data gravity further complicates cloud adoption and migration of production workloads – especially stateful apps with lots of data.
Helping customers seamlessly migrate and extend their VMware vSphere-based environments to VMware Cloud on AWS – without incurring unnecessary risks, costs or downtime – is our priority. VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension is a powerful service that we’ve offered as an add-on to VMware Cloud on AWS to enable bi-directional, large-scale enterprise cloud migration between on-premises vSphere-based environments and VMware Cloud on AWS. These capabilities are an integral component of a seamlessly integrated hybrid cloud.
Because we want all VMware Cloud on AWS customers, irrespective of their size, to realize cloud advantages faster, today we are announcing Hybrid Cloud Extension is now part of the core VMware Cloud on AWS offering. Hybrid Cloud Extension is no longer an add-on service customers have to purchase separately, and this addition is being made without any changes to the existing pricing for VMware Cloud on AWS. Customers can now take advantage of Hybrid Cloud Extension for:
- Large-scale migration between on-premises environments running vSphere 5.0+ and VMware Cloud on AWS with no replatforming, retesting, or change in tooling, reducing the time to migrate from months to days.
- Migrations can start over the internet, while preserving existing IP addressing and security, expediting the time to value for a cloud migration project, yet maintaining IT best practices.
- High performance Layer 2 network extensions, data synchronization, traffic analysis, WAN optimizations, and automated VPN with Strong Encryption (Suite B) that will enable secure, efficient, and effective cloud migration with no impact to application uptime.
- Simplified hybrid IT operations leveraging existing management tools like VMware vCenter.
- Transforming the application build, test and deploy lifecycle by maintaining secure, compatible hybridity between the local on-premises data center and VMware Cloud on AWS.
Move business application workloads from on-premises into the public cloud quickly, easily and securely, leveraging automation and best practices to reduce migration times and labor costs.
Based on VMware’s direct experience with customers, we have seen Hybrid Cloud Extension customers experience migrations up to 10 times faster than conventional approaches, with average labor savings of five hours per virtual server and downtimes reduced by as much as 90% in some cases. In addition to accelerating more secure cloud migration, Hybrid Cloud Extension has also been shown to reduce the downtime of production applications, de-risk the migration process, enable more efficient network migration capabilities, and accelerate the journey to the hybrid cloud.
Cloud computing is catalyzing transformation across industries. VMware is committed to making cloud adoption simpler, faster and most of all, valuable to our customers. To learn more about VMware Cloud on AWS and Hybrid Cloud Extension visit https://cloud.vmware.com/vmc-aws.
(1) – “Predictions 2018: Cloud Computing Accelerates Enterprise Transformation Everywhere, November 2017, Forrester”.
