Hervé Renault, Head of Cloud Providers, EMEA.
How many clouds do we need as the market matures?
Cloud computing has well and truly matured. Customers are searching for the right environments to support their business and mission critical applications as they digitise their operations to compete in dramatically disrupted markets.
As the market demands, so vendors supply. As I outlined in my last article, in EMEA alone we have 2,500 cloud providers signed up to the VMware Cloud Provider Program (VCPP). That’s great for enterprises, as competition keeps providers honest. Customers can choose exactly what they want for their requirements.
The market is maturing at such a rate that it’s likely that no matter what your application requirements, there’s a cloud for it.
But how many clouds do you really need?
The magic number is…
It really depends on the demands of the business and how their applications support those goals.
What is for sure that if, as is widely accepted, the average enterprise has six to eight cloud environments, that can mean requiring six to eight different skill sets.
It is also six to eight different providers that need to be compliant – a major source of concern for GDPR-focused enterprises. It can risk creating six to eight different silos – in effect, importing classic IT challenges into a cloud environment, and forgoing the benefits of being able to seamlessly move applications and workloads as demand dictates.
That’s why it’s important to have consistency – a common denominator, if you will, delivering a consistent infrastructure across private, public and edge in a truly hybrid cloud.
It’s what VMware is. Think about it – you will have VMware technology in your infrastructure, VMware in your data center and, thanks to VMware Cloud on AWS, now VMware extending into the public cloud. Consistency across environments – suddenly, you only need one set of skills, without hampering your choice of technology. Even better, this mirrors skills you will already have in your virtualized environments.
It’s a consistent architecture to allow applications to be hosted where suits them best and moved as required – exactly what a digitised operation needs to be able to deliver an enhanced customer experience.
For cloud providers, there’s an opportunity to become strategic, trusted advisors to enterprises – conscious of their role within the wider ecosystem, but able to focus on delivering their service.
…as many as you want
Enterprises are facing a juggling act – they want to transform their operations in order to meet customer demands in the digital era, yet they can’t afford to shut down as they swap critical applications for ones suited to cloud environments.
By deploying a consistent architecture, enterprises can enjoy the benefits of private and public clouds, without being overwhelmed and distracted by the increased complexity of introducing half a dozen new vendors to their IT organisation.
It’s an approach that has taken a long time to get here. In my next post, I’ll be looking at the journey the cloud has been on, and how it has matured.
