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5 Ways to Boost Your Hybrid Cloud Management – Part 1

Hybrid Cloud is Breaking Promises

It’s bold to say that hybrid cloud is breaking promises when starting a blog series for which you would like people to read more. But… We know that organizations want the benefits of hybrid cloud, such as increased efficiency, flexibility, speed and agility, and they want it today (maybe even yesterday). Yet without consistent infrastructure and management across on-premises and cloud environments, hybrid cloud adoption may be easier said than done as IT teams are struggling with:

• Decreased agility – 7.4 years to refactor and migrate 100 apps to the cloud (report)

• Increased risk – 90 percent reported skills shortages in cloud-related disciplines (report)

• Higher costs – $1M cost to move 1,000 workloads from one cloud to another (whitepaper)

Because of these obstacles, our customers tell us that some cloud adoption plans simply never gain traction. Other cloud adoption plans move forward, but slower than anticipated because organizations get stuck on the following:

  • Which applications to put into the cloud
  • Inefficiencies of fragmented infrastructure
  • Lack of single-pane-of-glass visibility
  • Resource shortages managing inconsistent operations across clouds

In all cases, organizations and IT leaders are disappointed, and you might even say discouraged, because the cloud gains they expected never materialize. The scenario is dramatically different in those that adopt VMware Cloud on AWS with VMware Cloud Management. VMware Cloud on AWS provides consistent infrastructure across a hybrid cloud environment so that customers can accelerate their hybrid cloud journey with minimal costs and risks involved. And with VMware vRealize Cloud Management support, you get consistent operations for your apps, infrastructure, and platform services across VMware Cloud on AWS and on-premises environments.

Therefore, to help you navigate through your hybrid cloud options, this will be the first blog in a series that will:

  • Reduce concerns about common challenges that organizations face when navigating their cloud journey
  • Expand upon three key initiatives and the options that are uniquely designed to simplify the cloud complexity
  • Discuss organizations that are choosing VMware Cloud Management with VMware Cloud on AWS and why

If you prefer to read all the information now, you can find the complete story of what will be discussed in this series in our eBook: 5 Ways to Improve Managing Your Hybrid Cloud.

How Applications Benefit From a Hybrid Cloud Approach

As global workloads continue to grow, organizations are recognizing the value that integrated public cloud and on-premises infrastructure provides. And they are rapidly moving to VMware Cloud on AWS to gain a unified infrastructure framework that bridges the gap.

Organizations can spin up a VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC
in 17 Global AWS Regions in typically under two hours
and scale capacity within minutes on average.

With VMware Cloud on AWS, IT and operations teams continue to add value to their organizations as they can:

  • Run, manage, secure and protect production applications in a hybrid IT environment
  • Accelerate cloud migrations from months and years to days and weeks
  • Innovate and respond faster to changing business demands
  • Use familiar skills, tools, and processes for managing cloud environments
  • Flexibly choose where to run apps based on business needs
  • Leverage established onsite enterprise security, governance and operational policies

The Role of Cloud Management

To get the best-of-both-world environments, IT teams are pairing VMware Cloud on AWS and VMware vRealize Cloud Management. In a recent podcast you’ll hear Taruna Gandhi, Senior Director of Cloud Management Product and Technical Marketing, discuss the VMware strategy in more detail.  You’ll hear her talk about when organizations combine these, they are achieving efficiency and agility as well as goals for consistent operations across on-premises and cloud environments—all while utilizing their existing teams, tools, and processes.

In addition, in a recent survey conducted by Management Insight Technologies organizations shared the capabilities that would be most helpful to operationalizing their hybrid clouds. Respondents overwhelmingly favored a consistent management plane across all of their infrastructure silos.

That insight points to the role of cloud management—specifically a single management model—becoming more widely understood as the best way for organizations to achieve a variety of cloud transformation goals. We know you have options, and in this blog series we’ll share the reasons why organizations are moving to VMware Cloud on AWS and how vRealize Cloud Management uniquely helps them each step of the way to reduce cloud complexity for five key initiatives, including:

  1. Cloud Migration
  2. Data Center Extension
  3. Disaster Recovery in the Cloud
  4. VDI Operations
  5. App Modernization

Specifically, we’ll focus on three key initiatives and those blogs in this series will go into detail about the cloud management capabilities for each initiative. We’ll share video demos and expand on customers who are using the technology today, and to start here’s an overview of how vRealize Cloud Management fits with VMWare Cloud on AWS.

  • Cloud Migration – With this initiative, a customer may have applications on-premises and want to move them from VMware vSphere/VMware Cloud Foundation into VMware Cloud on AWS. vRealize Cloud Management can accelerate the application migration providing full visibility into component dependencies, costs, compliance, network requirements, and the security posture, so migrating applications is simpler. The customer could start with discovering application and mapping dependencies with VMware vRealize Network Insight Cloud.
  • Data Center Extension – You may be an organization that has standardized on a hybrid cloud strategy for the foreseeable future, and you know that some workloads will live on-premises and others in the cloud. OR…You might have run out of space in your current data center and want to put either new workloads in VMware Cloud on AWS or move existing ones to it to make space on-premises. vRealize Cloud Management can help operationalize a hybrid cloud strategy providing consistent operations across clouds with self-service automation, governance, and operations across hybrid cloud. Organizations can start withvRealize Automation Cloud and vRealize Operations Cloud.
  • App Modernization – Organizations are also tasked with building and maintaining the Kubernetes infrastructure, and with vRealize Cloud Management customers can provide a modern and agile environment for developers. This would include self-service automation for both Kubernetes and VMs, streamline the developer experience with Infrastructure as code, and incorporate best practices from the DevOps world into traditional infrastructure & operations processes. Customers could start withvRealize Automation Cloud.

Customer Example

Financial services firm Provident Mexico sought to drive business growth by moving all of its applications to the cloud. After selecting VMware Cloud on AWS to run workloads and apps, Provident Mexico used vRealize Cloud Management to reduce its migration risk. The solution empowered IT leaders at the firm to optimize application delivery infrastructure and innovate faster to meet business speed and agility requirements. Specifically, Provident Mexico has improved its efficiency, lowered its risk and reduced its overall capacity requirements by 30% when comparing consumption of on-premises and cloud environments.

“ It’s intimidating to think about putting high-value workloads in the cloud, especially in financial services, but adopting cloud is both necessary and practical to achieve IT and business goals. It used to take me around a year and a half just to place an application in production. With VMware vRealize Cloud Management,
I now do it within months. It’s a game changer.”

Nestor Rodriquez, Director of Technology and Change, Provident Mexico

Ultimate Flexibility

VMware uniquely offers our customers the flexibility to choose consumption options of on-premises and SaaS, along with a hybrid subscription of both in a single license. It’s called VMware vRealize Cloud Universal.  It enables you to adopt a cloud-first model at your own pace while protecting existing investments as well as flex for data center extension and during uncertain cloud adoption schedules.

Key Takeaways

To sum up how to boost managing your hybrid cloud with vRealize Cloud Management and VMware Cloud on AWS, there are a few takeaways I would like to leave you with, including:

  1. A cloud operating model for consistent infrastructure and operations is imperative.
  2. You can bet heavily on cloud without committing 100 percent to cloud.
  3. Organizations are simplifying environments and eliminating complexity, thus becoming more efficient and achieving productivity gains and cost savings.
  4. Lead with optimizing your private cloud infrastructure and operations together with public cloud automation and capacity rightsizing by using vRealize Cloud Management with VMware on AWS to drive both IT agility and business agility.
  5. Redirect your focus from managing clouds to what matters most: building and delivering applications and services that differentiate your business.

In the second blog of this five-part series, I dive deeper into the cloud migration initiative and how vRealize Cloud Management can help you safely, securely, and rather quickly migrate your applications to VMware Cloud on AWS. See the related links section below to read the complete series.

For the complete story, download our eBook so you have all the information we’ll cover in the series in one place.

If you’re interested in moving ahead, you can try one of our hands on labs, start your VMware Cloud on AWS with vRealize Cloud Management Pathfinder learning journey, or request a conversation with one of our experts.

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Ellie Ruano

Ellie Ruano is a member of the VMware Cloud Management team and her responsibility spans across the vRealize and CloudHealth portfolio. Throughout her career she has been passionate about helping…

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