It’s no secret that cloud management, especially hybrid cloud management, has exploded in popularity.
In fact, 73% of enterprises are following a hybrid cloud strategy in 2024, according to Statista.
Thus, today’s IT professionals must expand their skillsets beyond on-premises clouds and develop expertise in managing enterprise hybrid clouds.
Find out how hybrid cloud upskilling helps IT teams thrive in the new world of cloud management and enables them to shift from technicians to trusted advisors.
The limitations of on-premises cloud
While on-premises vSphere is robust for managing virtualized environments locally, it encounters limitations when integrated into a hybrid cloud setup.
Interoperability with public cloud platforms—which 80% of enterprises will use in 2024, per Statista—can be challenging with on-prem solutions. This requires IT teams to leverage additional tools and services for seamless workload migration and management across environments. Depending on specific integration solutions can limit flexibility and increase operational complexity.
Data center resources also restrict scalability for on-premises environments. Even at the enterprise level, organizations may struggle to scale rapidly in response to changing workloads and business demands.
Maintaining consistent operational practices across hybrid environments can pose additional problems. Differences in networking, security configurations, and management tools between on-premises vSphere and public clouds require careful planning and execution. However, teams must bridge these operational gaps to ensure seamless governance, compliance, and performance management across hybrid environments.
Successful digital transformation can be challenging without a hybrid cloud. According to IBM, 71% of technology decision-makers struggle to realize a transformation’s full potential without a hybrid cloud strategy.
To overcome these challenges and improve cloud management and performance, IT teams must adopt hybrid cloud solutions and grasp the skills to adopt, operate, and optimize them.
The sky is the limit with VMware Cloud Foundation
The best way to transition to a hybrid cloud infrastructure? Adopting a managed cloud solution like VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF).
VCF integrates compute, storage, networking, and management services across private and public clouds, providing a unified platform for cloud management. This unified approach simplifies operations, improves resource management across diverse environments, and decreases interoperability effort by 75%, according to Forrester’s Total Economic Impact (TEI) Study of VMware Cloud Foundation.
Flexibility and scalability are pivotal VCF advantages. Organizations can leverage the public clouds’ scaling capabilities while retaining control over critical on-premises workloads. This flexibility supports dynamic resource scaling based on demand, promoting efficient workload management across different deployment models. VCF also facilitates workload portability, ensuring the seamless movement of applications between private and public clouds as business needs evolve.
VCF’s unified security policies and controls strengthen hybrid cloud security and compliance by consistently enforcing security measures across hybrid environments. Centralized management and automated security practices further bolster defenses, simplifying tasks like patching, access management, and threat detection across the entire infrastructure. With VCF, enterprises can save $4.8 million, per the TEI Study.
Here are some examples of how various industries utilize hybrid cloud solutions:
- Healthcare: Healthcare organizations leverage hybrid clouds to securely store and manage sensitive patient data, ensuring compliance with healthcare regulations while scaling resources dynamically to support diverse medical applications and services.
- Finance and Banking: The finance and banking sectors benefit from hybrid clouds through improved data security and regulatory compliance, flexible scalability for transaction processing and customer service applications, and tight control over financial operations.
- Government: Agencies utilize hybrid cloud solutions to modernize IT infrastructures, improve citizen services through secure digital platforms, and enhance data accessibility while maintaining stringent security protocols and compliance with regulatory frameworks.
Hybrid cloud management with VMware Cloud Foundation
Ready to enter the world of hybrid cloud? Developing VCF skills equips IT professionals with the expertise to effectively implement and manage hybrid cloud environments, elevating their cloud management capabilities.
VCF upskilling can help IT professionals achieve the following objectives:
- Simplified hybrid cloud management: VCF training provides IT teams with the skills to unify management interfaces and policies across hybrid environments, streamlining operations and reducing complexity.
- Enhanced hybrid cloud security and compliance: IT professionals learn to enforce consistent security measures and compliance protocols across all cloud deployments, ensuring data integrity and regulatory adherence while mitigating risks.
- Increased agility and scalability: IT professionals build the skills to leverage automated deployment and scaling capabilities, facilitating rapid adaptation to changing business demands and enabling seamless resource scaling across enterprise hybrid clouds.
- Improved operational efficiency: By mastering VCF, IT teams can optimize resource utilization, automate routine tasks, and enhance troubleshooting and performance monitoring capabilities—improving overall efficiency and reducing downtime.
The even better news? Your existing vSphere administration skills are a valuable foundation for learning VCF.
VCF training builds on your vSphere expertise, expanding your knowledge into integrated cloud management, storage, networking, and VMs. It also enhances your ability to orchestrate workload placement, ensure consistency in policy enforcement, and leverage automation for streamlined operations.
By adding VCF to their resume, administrators can leverage their skills for faster deployment and cloud management. These capabilities empower them to drive efficiency, spark innovation, and ultimately function as trusted advisors within their teams and organizations.
How to get started
Start building your VCF and hybrid cloud management skills today with VCF Learning! Visit the VCF Learning homepage to learn more about our training and VMware certification programs for IT professionals, teams, and organizations.
