Nick Cross, EMEA HCI Senior Director
Autonomous vehicles. Smart buildings. Wearables. Commercial drones. New digital payment methods. What could they mean for your business?
Now more than ever, technology is a key business enabler, with the potential to accelerate time to market for new products, services, and user experiences. How can you identify and adopt the right technologies without disrupting your business?
The answer is to build a secure, flexible digital foundation that underpins all your transformation projects. A new foundational infrastructure that lets you integrate tomorrow’s technologies – whilst at the same time, making the most of those you already have today.
A Digital Foundation – what is it and why do you need one?
A digital foundation is the fundamental software-based platform you need to achieve your business goals through digital technology. It will help you:
- create a cloud-based, virtualised infrastructure that best meets your future app and business needs
- build cyber resilience through a software-defined approach to networking and security
- empower employees to do their best work and positively transform customer experiences
How a Digital Foundation can underpin your transition to the cloud
Using disparate cloud technologies and providers in an unplanned way frequently makes things more complex and difficult. Simple tasks, like moving apps from your data center to the public cloud, can be fraught with issues. Development costs for ‘cloud-agnostic’ apps can spiral out of control. Having multiple teams for different cloud platforms wastes scarce resources and produces little return.
An effective digital foundation should be able to support any and all cloud options agnostically. It should be able to take into account the requirements of all your workloads, what can be borne by ‘owned’ versus ‘rented’ infrastructure, the skillsets within your teams and the need to manage different environments.
A Digital Foundation can provide a platform for change. But plan your journey…
A digital foundation is the starting point to take advantage of new digital transformation technologies and getting it wrong could be costly. According to Gartner;
“Through 2020, 45% of organisations that perform lift-and-shift to cloud IaaS, without optimisation, will be overprovisioned by as much as 55%, and will overspend by 70% during the first 18 months.” *
On the other hand, getting your Digital Foundation choices right should allow you to give greater customer satisfaction, faster time-to-market, significant cost savings, a massive reduction in complexity and improved security for all your apps.
*Gartner, Ten Moves to Lower Your AWS IaaS Costs – Refreshed 15 October 2018. Published 25 April 2017.
Consider the benefits of hybrid cloud
Hybrid cloud architectures can form a solid base for any future digital foundation. Many organisations are already adopting hyperconverged infrastructures which closely integrate computing, storage and virtualisation resources in a single system. This shift alone can dramatically drive down cost and increase efficiency and is often a first step towards adopting hybrid cloud more fully.
Putting a Digital Foundation to work
That is exactly what The Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) did. It is the largest governmental research organisation in France, and the largest fundamental science research agency in Europe. Using VMware Cloud Foundation, it has implemented a robust and comprehensive digital foundation, using a private cloud to reduce the time taken for deployment tasks from weeks to minutes. See a Digital Foundation at work in CNRS
Find out more
Check out our latest guide: A Digital Business Needs a Digital Foundation highlighting the vital role a digital foundation could play in your business, including a valuable blueprint to help you create your own
Attend our on-demand webcast: Building a Hybrid Cloud with VMware Cloud Foundation. Register today
