A leading ministry wanted to become a cloud service provider for their peer organizations. To accomplish that goal, they chose VMware Cloud Foundation. Their environment was complex. They needed to integrate with more than 15 vendors such as HPE, SAP, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, and Dell to name a few. They wanted to host SAP workloads running HR and payroll applications in a multi-tenant self-service cloud serving over 3.5 million users.
Enterprise architect leads the way
Within the engagement, there was no enterprise architect with the deep skills needed to drive this project with all the vendors involved. Without an enterprise architecture, vendors will all work to their own timeline and requirements resulting in silos of technologies rather than a fully integrated solution. To avoid falling short of their goals, the ministry turned to VCF Professional Services. I was the Enterprise Architect responsible for the overall design of the self-service cloud solution and led the integration effort with all the vendors.
Self-service cloud architecture
The customer had multiple regions across the country and multiple availability zones. Distributed across the availability zones are multiple VCF instances, serving SAP and other workloads. The architecture needed to support resiliency, high availability, disaster recovery, security, and compliance. The design also needed to reduce manual friction for day 2 operations as much as possible. As the enterprise architect, I led the collaboration effort with the customer and the other vendors to drive the project forward. For instance, one of the key factors was to make sure multi-tenancy was honored across the different technologies that integrated with VMware Cloud Foundation.
Approach
As enterprise architects, we design fully integrated solutions with the entire VMware Cloud Foundation stack to meet the business requirements the customer is looking to achieve. If a design is too complex, customers won’t be able to operate it. If it’s too simple, the solution won’t achieve their goals. Driving requirements and helping the different vendors understand what is needed for a successful solution is challenging. It requires a great deal of experience to navigate. We’ve seen engagements fail because customers decided to do it themselves without focusing on the enterprise architecture side of the solution or when multiple vendors’ products were just deployed individually and not integrated as a complete solution. My colleagues and I have experience with hundreds of use cases across many customer engagements, lessons learned, and an in-depth understanding of how the technology should be integrated. We help customers adopt their cloud solutions quickly and design it to scale as their business grows and evolves.
Get expert help for your next project
You too can benefit from the expertise of an enterprise architect. Learn how VCF Professional Services can help with your cloud initiatives by contacting your VMware Sales Representative.
