In this blog, the last of the five-part series, I’m going to discuss the role of a cloud operating model powered by modern cloud management, the alternative offered by cloud providers, and why vRealize Cloud Management can uniquely help your cloud journey.
Throughout the blog series I’ve been talking about how you can boost your hybrid cloud with vRealize Cloud Management on VMware Cloud on AWS. You’ll see here that I’m expanding the topic to include not only VMware Cloud but also public clouds for a unified multi-cloud management approach. Also, this is a great time to mention our VMware Multi-Cloud Quarterly Briefing so you can see Purnima Padmanabhan, Senior Vice President and GM of Cloud Management, discuss the cloud operating model in depth.
The Cloud Operating Model
It’s known that digitally transforming organizations are moving to cloud (or already there). A full 97 percent of enterprises worldwide use some combination of on-premises private clouds and one or more public cloud services, according to IDC’s Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Complexity Requires Unified Cross-Cloud Management and Control report. Yet, if an organization isn’t careful, it could end up with a complex, disjointed, and often very expensive environment.
Although, normally we wouldn’t start the cloud conversation with cloud computing and the types of deployment models. Conversations should start at the business level. How your organization uses, processes, secures, and reads applications and data, and how it does these things today and plans to do them next year, three years, and five years from now. Ideally, business strategies drive application and data strategies, with application and data strategies providing inputs into the cloud strategy. They’re operationalized by a cloud operating model that’s powered by a cloud management solution with capabilities (you may already have today) for maximizing the return on any and all clouds your business uses.
It’s important to remember that cloud is not a destination. Cloud is a journey to better serve the business through technology. Your cloud operating model will bridge and bind your application and cloud strategy decisions, accelerating your digital transformation. No matter where your organization is on your cloud journey, just starting or well underway, a cloud operating model rolled out with a comprehensive cloud management solution will be effective for all types of clouds to help take you into the future. All so you can support your business with the agility it needs.
To learn more about the cloud operating model, start by reading The Cloud Operating Model blog series.
Cloud is Breaking Promises
While cloud can drive innovation and solve business problems, the combination of private and public cloud services means you may have technology silos in your organization. You may also have operational priorities dispersed across disjointed teams. This is making it difficult to get a holistic view into your organization’s use of cloud services, to share best practices, and ensure sufficient governance. This increases management overhead and complexity to maxed out IT organizations needing to support cloud environments. The result is lack of visibility and increased risk exposure. I’ll go back to something I said in my first blog, which is that this complexity results in the following:
- Decreased agility. It can take 7.4 years to refactor and migrate 100 apps to the cloud, according to ESG Research’s Hybrid Cloud Trends—Strategies for Optimizing and Managing On-premises and Public Cloud Infrastructure report.
- High costs. Investment can be $1M to move 1,000 workloads from one cloud to another, according to VMware’s Six Ways Application Requirements Drive Your Infrastructure Decisions paper.
- Increased risk. A full 90 percent of surveyed organizations have skills shortages in cloud-related disciplines, 451 Research’s 2019 Trends in Cloud Transformation report shows.
Because of these obstacles, customers tell us that some cloud adoption plans simply never gain traction or don’t progress quickly enough to gain the expected benefits. This is a shame because these obstacles can be overcome with an effective cloud operating model and robust cloud management solution.
Role of Cloud Management
I’ll start this section with a statement: Research shows that respondents overwhelmingly favor a consistent management plane across all their infrastructure silos.
When enterprise respondents around the world were surveyed by Management Insight Technologies for the VMware Application Modernization in a Multi-Cloud World report, they shared the capabilities that would be most helpful to operationalizing their clouds, easing everyday operations, they overwhelmingly favored a consistent management plane across all their infrastructure silos. (Yes, I said it twice.) Their belief: effective cloud management breaks down silos while working effectively across on-premises and cloud environments.
That insight points to the role of cloud management — specifically a single management model as the best way for organizations to achieve a variety of cloud transformation goals. Those same surveyed leaders reported these primary benefits of consistency across multi-cloud environments:
- 49% – Improved responsiveness to customers and lines of business
- 38% – Reduced IT operating costs
- 28% – Faster delivery of application features and releases
From wherever your team is starting in their cloud journey, investing in the right tools and capabilities will help build confidence and move your organization forward to cloud success. Modern cloud management from VMware delivers complete visibility and guardrail governance whether you’re
- Onboarding new public cloud services
- Building new private or hybrid cloud services
- Growing and managing existing cloud services
Key Initiatives
In my last three blogs of this series, I specifically showed how vRealize Cloud Management is helping organizations through the cloud journey for three key initiatives – Cloud Migration, Data Center Extension, and Application Modernization. If you didn’t get a chance to read those blogs, vRealize Cloud Management enables teams to focus on transforming business in these ways:
- Cloud Migration
- Assess and inventory infrastructure
- Right-size and reclaim resources
- Assess bandwidth with egress charges
- After the migration, verify health and performance
- Enable end-to-end network visibility and troubleshooting
- Set up cloud constructs and automate provisioning
- Ease Day 2 operations
- Enjoy event and log analytics for all infrastructure
- Data Center Extension
- Day 0: Plan and Assess
- Discover applications and map dependencies
- Establish controls with resource limits per project/user group
- Automate provisioning and apply governance
- Day 1: Migrate and Monitor
- Monitor the VMware SDDC and cloud objects from apps to infra
- Build provisioning templates
- Automate compliance checks
- Day 2: Operationalize
- Troubleshoot
- Optimize by reclaiming wasted resources
- Rightsize VMs
- Conduct bill analysis, cost optimization, and pricing
- Enable end-to-end network visibility and troubleshooting
- Day 0: Plan and Assess
- App Modernization
- Enable application discovery
- Conduct Kubernetes to infrastructure inventory
- Combine and offer infrastructure objects
- Define and self-serve predefined Kubernetes resources
- Iterate closely with developers
- Extend actions to any system with ABX (FaaS)
Business Outcomes Delivered by vRealize Cloud Management
Let’s start with the benefit of consistent operations, which vRealize Cloud Management provides across private, hybrid and multiple public clouds. Essential operational capabilities delivered by the same management solution provides visibility, operations, automation, security, and governance to properly manage and operate systems and applications across multiple cloud environments. With consistent operations, you can rest assured your cloud investments are continuously optimized, effectively governed, and highly secure.
In addition to consistent operations, organizations that are on different digital transformation journeys can take advantage of the same cloud management solution to achieve these key business outcomes:
- Speed up organization agility. Through accelerated infrastructure and application service delivery, this is key to gaining a competitive advantage.
- Provision in minutes, versus weeks
- Assure performance. This is not only for uptime but ultimately creating more satisfied and loyal customers.
- 30% reduced unplanned downtime
- Optimize cloud costs. The outcome of which is improving the bottom line.
- 25% average monthly savings
- Lower risk. A result of work around strengthening security and streamlining compliance.
- 75% reduced time creating security policies
And there’s one more added benefit, low-to-no training investment because your staff already knows VMware. Avoid the need to waste IT staff time learning cloud-only capabilities while allowing teams to take advantage of advanced, automated operations that cloud-native management products simply cannot perform.
Cloud Provider Tools
Because many organizations in traditional industries weren’t born in the cloud, they’re running a mix of public and local resources that consist of a patchwork set of existing and modern application architectures. That makes it impossible for them to use just one set of cloud provider tools to manage hybrid environments.
Your teams might be caught struggling to broker services among clouds and SDDCs with lack of consistency, control, and visibility. With VMware vRealize Cloud Management, you’re able to easily migrate workloads between multiple clouds.
Let’s look at what makes vRealize Cloud Management uniquely capable of bringing consistency across your multi-cloud environment.
Why vRealize Cloud Management is Unique
Your goal is to drive digital transformation by exploiting cloud infrastructure, services, and tooling, and I’m saying it requires a different business-technology relationship model. It takes powering your evolving cloud operating model with a modern cloud management solution. And, there’s no other intelligent cloud management platform like vRealize. You can use it to manage your on-premises VMware infrastructure stack, VMware Cloud, and extend to native public cloud services. It’s proven and differentiated by the integrated capabilities, flexibility, and partnerships necessary to successfully deliver on the promise of cloud.
We know you have options, and here are some reasons why vRealize Cloud Management has you covered.
- Proven solution
VMware is both a trusted vendor and a market leader. vRealize Cloud Management capabilities have been proven through deployments of tens of thousands of mission critical and large-scale environments and huge annual cloud spend under management. The customers’ trust in the VMware technical strength has helped make vRealize Cloud Management the leading vendor in market share and revenue of both worldwide cloud system and service management software and IT automation and configuration management as reported by IDC. In addition, analysts rank VMware the leader in the following reports:- Forrester Wave: Hybrid Cloud Management
- Forrester Wave: Cloud Cost Management and Optimization
- Comprehensive capabilities
vRealize Cloud Management provides an integrated solution to simplify cloud adoption with capabilities ranging from self-driving IT operations management, self-service automation and governance, cost management, log analytics, and network operations. In addition, vRealize Cloud Management has a proven track record of delivering innovation for multi-cloud, containers and VMs, AI, ML, DevOps practices, and SaaS. Along with this is our superior customer success team to guide you through all the stages of your journey. Learn more about each one: - Multi-cloud management
There are certainly a core set of operations that you can have individual teams perform for a particular cloud. Although, to truly implement a multi-cloud operating model, you need visibility and consistency across the cloud silos you have today. And this is VMware’s sweet spot. No matter what cloud you choose, deployment approach you prefer, or business objective you’re trying to achieve with cloud, vRealize Cloud Management can support you. Learn more on our vRealize Cloud Management web page and also CloudHealth by VMware.
- Ultimate flexibility
To support the pathway to business innovation, efficiency, and rapid scalability, vRealize Cloud Management uniquely offers a model that allows customers the flexibility to choose consumption options of both on-premises and SaaS, along with pioneering a hybrid subscription of both in a single license. This allows you to adopt a cloud-first model at your own pace while protecting existing investments or flex when you have unexpected spikes. Learn more on our vRealize Cloud Universal web page.
- Broadest ecosystem
To meet the needs of diverse IT environments, vRealize Cloud Management is highly extensible with 220 ecosystem integrations across hardware vendors, HCI platforms, data center infrastructure, applications, templates, and services for a seamless operating environment across private and public clouds. Find a partner today.
Customer Example
In our Multi-Cloud Briefing mentioned at the beginning of this blog, you can see our customer, GFK, talk about how they started with the data center, extended to hybrid cloud, and integrated native public cloud services for one consistent user experience with stability in a data driven business using vRealize Cloud Management. View this video.
Summary
No matter where your cloud journey starts or will end, a consistent cloud operating model is imperative. By simplifying management and eliminating complexity, your organization can become more efficient. You can achieve greater agility at lower costs with reduced risks as you accelerate your business. Best of all, modern cloud management from VMware redirects your IT focus from upgrading and maintaining IT to delivering services and applications that differentiate your organization for a competitive advantage. This is why vRealize Cloud Management is unique.
For the complete story, download our eBook so you have all the information from this blog series in one place.
Learn more about vRealize Cloud Management on VMWare Cloud on AWS Pathfinder learning journey, try our vRealize Cloud Management hands on lab, or request a conversation with one of our experts.
Additional reading:
- Part 1: 5 Ways to Boost Your Hybrid Cloud Management
- Part 2: Low-Cost Migrations to VMware Cloud on AWS with vRealize Cloud Management
- Part 3: Extending Your Data Center to VMware Cloud on AWS with vRealize Cloud Management
- Part 4: Managing Application Modernization on VMware Cloud on AWS with vRealize Cloud Management
