Written by Casey Burns, Senior Manager, VCF GTM Strategy, VMware and Kanal Patel, Manager, Partner WW RTM, Cloud Management, VMware
February 2023 marked the 25th anniversary of VMware, the pioneer of virtualization technology. Virtualization technology is a technology that was viewed as impossible but is now revered as one of the most significant transformational inventions of the past 50 years. As VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram has said:
“We virtualized storage and networking, making ‘software defined’ the standard architecture for the modern datacenter. Now we are leading the charge on creating the multi-cloud future, blazing a trail to help our customers realize the vast potential of their digital transformations.”
This has been validated by over 400,000 customers and over 5,000 patents and counting. But what does multi-cloud mean?
What Is Multi-Cloud?
To answer this question, let us first look at how customers view multi-cloud. According to IDC, workloads (or applications) are on a continual and exponential 20% compound annual growth rate, peaking at about 743 million by 2025, an extraordinary number, though some analysts may view it to be conservative. Additionally, a recent Flexera State of the Cloud report states that over 89% of respondents say that they will have an environment of multiple “clouds,” with 80% saying their infrastructure will be “hybrid” cloud based.
We see multi-cloud as applications residing and running in a mix of private clouds (customer managed or partner managed), public clouds (usually Hyperscalers), sovereign clouds (clouds where data needs to reside in a specific country for regulatory reasonings) and, potentially, edge-based clouds, for remote sites or data needing to live “at the edge.” Hybrid cloud is where a customer needs the upmost flexibility in where their applications need to be built, run, and managed. We view these individual clouds as landing zones for applications and workloads to operate.
What hybrid clouds deliver is a flexible architecture that allows for customers to seamlessly leverage an on-prem private cloud and public cloud instance. Both have the same consistent infrastructure so that apps can move between when needed. An intelligence layer is designed to determine not only the appropriate “landing zone” but visibility, observability, operational control and, most importantly, automation of building, managing and running these various workloads and applications.
The Shift to Multi-Cloud
While the race to public cloud accelerated VMware’s technology advancements, it also brought to light a set of challenges for customers. This has forced customers to take a more introspective approach to their cloud strategy, instead of expending all their resources on public cloud. We have seen customers go all in cloud and simply “lift and shift” legacy applications only to find out later that the latency is too high, the data set is too bloated and, hence, too expensive to run in public cloud (data gravity, if you will). They are now looking to find a more manageable and cost-effective alternative to bring applications back in-house.
Customers will need to provide their customers and employees with a consistent experience and cloud like operating model. The same customers built cloud-native applications in a public cloud that are running as intended, so they want to leave those in their current state. Under the VMware ecosystem, the infrastructure looks and operates that same, regardless of whether it is in a public or private cloud-based environment.
Managing Multi-Clouds
With the rise of multi-cloud, customers now have both on-prem and public cloud environments they need to manage. Siloed teams and incoherent management solutions can result in a lack of visibility and control as well as increased cloud cost. A cloud-operating model, with a modern multi-cloud management solution, will bring consistency to managing all types of clouds and enable customers to adapt, respond and innovate on the fly.
VMware has built a single cloud management control plane for unified visibility and consistent operations of applications, infrastructure and platform services. Customers are able to set up the cloud infrastructure, define cloud constructs, deploy infrastructure and apps, manage performance and costs of the cloud, and continuously deploy and observe application in a single management pane. This unified multi-cloud management framework enables customers to accelerate cloud adoption and application delivery, optimize their infrastructure across various clouds, protect assets by managing risk, strengthen security posture and automate governance.
As a VMware partner, you can help customers manage this multi-cloud chaos by delivering advisory services, deployment services and even actual cloud-based services. With the help of Partner focused VMware tools and assets available on Partner Connect as well as technical certifications, you can further deliver value-added services to customers and profitability to your organization.
Learn more about VMware’s multi-cloud business:
Senior ManagerVCF GTM Strategy
Partner WW RTM, Cloud Management
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VMware is leading the way in developing a multi-cloud future. As more companies move their operations to the cloud, there is a growing need for a platform that can seamlessly manage workloads across multiple cloud providers. VMware has emerged as a key player in this space, offering a comprehensive suite of solutions that enable businesses to manage their IT infrastructure across multiple clouds.