Hervé Renault, Vice President Cloud, EMEA, VMware
Today’s organizations have three key requirements of their IT teams: the agility to modernize applications at the speed the business demands, the freedom to build and run them on the cloud of their choice – whether in a data center or at the edge – and the resilience afforded by enterprise-level security and operations.
For many businesses, however, the innovation required to deliver on these requirements is being stifled by complexity. Cloud is often the cause of this complexity if not managed correctly, but it can also provide the solution.
That’s why we recently unveiled VMware Cloud, which provides businesses with the capabilities to unlock the power of every cloud, in a centralised environment. It affords customers the simplicity of a single cloud operating model to help them make sense of their complex multi-cloud reality and drive innovation faster.
While the ability to innovate has always been a key differentiator for businesses, it has become pivotal after a year in which the need to respond rapidly to shifting expectations and situations has been vital to success and, in many cases, survival. With VMware Cloud, our aim is to help organizations take advantage of this momentum, with a distributed, multi-cloud platform which simplifies the journey to the cloud for organizations of all sizes and creates the fastest path to application modernization.
The introduction of VMware Cloud Universal is crucial to this, giving businesses access to a more flexible way to consume cloud infrastructure, at their own pace; whether that’s scaling out in a hybrid cloud, bursting to the cloud to add capacity or adopting a SaaS and subscription model.
I encourage you to watch the replay of the announcement here, but in the meantime, I want to highlight my top three strategic lessons for making sure your multi-cloud journey delivers success in both the short and long term:
- Lesson 1 – Start viewing cloud as a model rather than as a place. The cloud is not a fixed location, but an entity that can grow and be worked on by multiple teams. Its core, and everything that governs it, needs to stay the same. Businesses should be aspiring to a modern cloud infrastructure that is consistent everywhere, that evolves and extends the infrastructure to thousands of other cloud infrastructure partners. This consistency provides choice, while avoiding complexity.
- Lesson 2 – Success relies on continuous delivery. Ensuring applications deliver consistent value to lines of business requires careful care and provisioning of each and every application. This relies on being able to understand and track the requirements and performance of that application, and to understand what it needs, when it needs it. Doing all of that manually is an impossible ask, which is why a solution such as the new VMware Cloud Console, a single monitoring and management environment for VMware Cloud infrastructure regardless of where it’s deployed, is so significant.
- Lesson 3 – Prioritise the apps that offer the most value. It’s easy to get sucked into the “plan everything, complete nothing” cycle, or opting to do a complete lift and shift of all your applications without considering what’s required of each one. The secret is in knowing which will provide business value quickest and prioritising them. Before embarking on any cloud project, businesses should ensure that they have done the work to identify these applications, and the cloud environments that best suit them.
Our customer William Hill is a great example of how organizations can benefit from a highly flexible, consumption-based cloud model. By migrating its workloads to VMware Cloud on AWS, it was able to migrate 1000 machines to the cloud within 12 hours, many times the speed that it would have taken to refactor and rehost the individual apps. This has allowed it to bring new apps and services to market quickly and securely, enhancing its ability to bring innovative new services to customers and drive competitive advantage. And all of this is done using a single platform for unified operations and security.
With 2021 described as the year of multi-cloud, businesses have never been better placed to start harnessing the power of cloud and ushering in a new era of applications. The flexibility and choice that it offers enables best in class applications that in turn empower companies to offer the user experiences that today’s consumers demand and deserve.
Learn more about our VMware Cloud solution, attend our vForum Online on 22 June.
