Companies in every geography and industry have had the fortune, in recent years, to choose from a variety of remarkable cloud platforms to run their applications—including on-prem private cloud, VMware clouds, and native public clouds. In fact, 83% of organizations surveyed by VMware have their application workloads distributed across multiple cloud environments1.  

But every major technological advancement creates new challenges and opportunities. IT leaders have been telling me that they need a true cloud operating model across multi-cloud to address two key challenges: 

  • First, they’re stuck in partial automation purgatory. It takes their siloed teams many IT tickets to set up security, networking, and load-balancing services to deploy an application. This isn’t just operationally inefficient, it breeds friction between the infrastructure and application owners. 
  • Second, operating across multi-cloud environments is complicated. Teams lack consistent visibility, policy, and operations across cloud deployments. This causes change management nightmares, security blind spots, and unprecedented delays in troubleshooting issues. 

It doesn’t have to be this way. Today, I’m proud to share that VMware is taking a significant step towards making a single cloud operating model for managing and securing networks a reality through our launch of NSX+. Our new cloud-based offering enables IT leaders with innovative capabilities that speed up cloud operations and application deployments without being dependent on hardware appliances. This includes: 

  • A multi-cloud Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) that provides full isolation of networking, security, and load balancing services to multiple tenants on a shared VMware Cloud infrastructure. Enterprises can now support the needs of multiple lines of business and application owners while allowing the infrastructure team to enforce guardrails and prevent impact on other tenants. It’s a true self-service model that gives app owners the agility to deploy apps at cloud speed. 
  • A new cloud-managed service offering for our NSX network virtualization, security and advanced load balancing services that allow companies to run their applications across their multi-cloud environments from a centralized console. You’ll be able to rapidly deliver services to apps wherever they reside.  

When I say networking, I don’t just mean connectivity. Connectivity alone is not enough for multi-cloud environments. Multi-cloud networking needs to include firewalling, load balancing, workload migration, and observability capabilities to operationalize a true cloud operating model. With this, building cloud environments with NSX+ brings you a variety of benefits:  

  • Happier application owners
    One of the main benefits of the cloud is true self-service efficiency for your app teams. They want to be able to provision the network resources required to launch a new app with a few mouse clicks, rather than have to submit a support ticket and wait for weeks or months for multiple infrastructure teams to set them up. It gets even more complicated when an app needs to run or interact with apps on other clouds. Then, you’re in “automation and a ticket” mode—and that’s not true automation. NSX+ multi-cloud VPC delivers on bringing true self-service automation to VMware Cloud environments.
     
  • Happier infrastructure teams
    The people responding to all those garden variety requests dislike partial automation as much as the app owners who submit them. By making true self-service possible with NSX+ multi-cloud VPC, your infrastructure team can focus on more rewarding, higher-impact business innovation.
     
  • Better ROI on your on-prem and multi-cloud networks
    While native public clouds remain popular, companies aren’t ditching the on-premises networks they’ve relied on for decades. With NSX+, customers can reap the benefits of cloud on-premises and across their multi-cloud environments and get better cost efficiencies for traditional and modern applications.
     
  • Better security
    The best home security systems monitor the whole house, not just the ingress and egress points. They not only prevent the obvious break-ins but can watch for even more sophisticated schemes – like the landscaper who comes in for a glass of water before quickly slipping into the closet where the jewelry is kept. Clouds are no different: managing each cloud separately creates security gaps that today’s sophisticated cyber-attackers know to look for. Only by having a truly centralized, end-to-end management model can companies hope to have stronger security in this hybrid world.  

NSX+ works with your on-prem NSX environments and helps you extend the benefits to your multi-cloud environments. Truly centralized, end-to-end management is achievable with NSX+, which makes the true cloud operating model attainable through a distributed, scale-out software architecture. You’ll finally be free from partial automation purgatory with: 

Zero proprietary appliances thanks to our complete L2-L7 stack—network virtualization, advanced load balancing, and network security – done entirely in software.  

Almost Zero tickets to deploy applications at cloud speed. 

All done with Zero Trust principles to enforce a strong ransomware defense with lateral security. 

 

Sources: 

1 VMware FY23 Workloads Tracker, January 2022; N=1700 Technology Decision Makers specializing in workload deployments