Multi-Cloud: Strategy or Inevitable Outcome? (or both?)

In my last blog, we talked about the idea that multi-cloud is an inevitable outcome whether you have a strategy or not–making the argument that a strategy allows for thoughtful planning and preparation. What kind of a good corporate citizen would I be if I didn’t talk through how VMWare can help you build and deliver that multi-cloud strategy? In this post I’ll to do just that.

VMware’s Approach

VMware’s approach can help at any stage–wherever your business is at any given moment. Our goal is to reduce the effort it takes to deliver multi-cloud to your organization.  Here’s how we’re doing it:

Step by Step: Hybrid cloud is often a step on the path to multi-cloud, and VMware Cloud is engineered to simplify migrating your applications to the cloud. Using VMware HCX, you can bulk migrate hundreds of apps a week! Once apps have been moved to the cloud, then you can modernize them. Many companies make the mistake of trying to modernize before they migrate to the cloud. But migrating then modernizing allows the organization to take advantage of all the cloud benefits, including self-service APIs, dynamic infrastructure (new servers in just a few minutes), new infrastructure services (for example, Kubernetes) or application services (such as databases and messaging systems).

We have found this model is more successful for our customers for two reasons. First, there’s often an urgent business driver to move out of the datacenter. Perhaps a colo is coming off lease or the CFO wants to reduce costs. Quickly migrating to the cloud, without having to wait the months or years it can take to modernize, allows the business to realize its goals. Second, the actual process of modernization is faster, due to all the advantages mentioned above the cloud environment provides.

Multi-Cloud: We recognize there is no “one size fits all” approach to multi-cloud. Therefore, we have solutions for each of the different multi-cloud approaches discussed in the last blog:

 Benefits of VMware’s Approach

VMware’s unique approach delivers benefits from lines of business to developers to operations. Let’s take a closer look:

Lines of businesses and developers: faster delivery. Developers want a simple way to get their latest innovations to customers as quickly as possible. There may be business requirements specifying that their apps must run in diverse environments. Dealing with heterogeneous environments can be a challenge for developers. Being able to abstract over some of these differences (with either a consistent infrastructure or consistent applications approach) allows developers to focus more on building out their core business logic and less on the specifics of the underlying cloud, enabling them to deliver code to users faster.

Operations: simplified operations. While building an app is challenging, operating an app is arguably more so. The age-old question “If you get paged at 2 a.m. due to an app failure, will you know how to fix it?” applies here. Ops teams must have the training and tooling in place to be able to respond to outages and ensure the app meets its SLAs. Diversity in clouds and environments causes challenges for operations teams in that different tools, skillsets and processes may be needed to address an issue, potentially resulting in longer downtime and missed SLAs. Being able to leverage a common set of operational tooling across clouds is critical for driving simplicity in operations to meet an app’s SLA.   

CIO/CFO: economies of scope. We all understand economies of scale, but let’s define economies of scope: It refers to the breadth of an offering. Our focus on consistency for the broadest possible set of clouds and on-premises infrastructure drives dramatic OpEx cost efficiency and savings, for both developers and operators. There are very real challenges in building and managing apps across many diverse clouds and environments, whether it’s needing to fund multiple operations teams, spending more time and money for training, or investing in new tools. This manifests itself in dramatically higher operating costs from a CIO/CFO point of view. Focusing on economies of scope with the right infrastructure capabilities and operations tools from VMware can dramatically reduce costs.

Learn More

This was just a quick preview of what VMware is doing in multi-cloud and its benefits.  Be on the lookout for further information about it coming soon!

If you want to get your hands on something today, I recommend you taking a deeper look at VMware Cloud on AWS. It’s a great way to see how VMware can help you and your business with both hybrid and multi-cloud. More information on building your digital can be found here.

Kit Colbert is VP & CTO, Cloud Platform BU, at VMware, driving technical strategy and innovation for VMware Cloud Foundation, vSphere and VMware’s hybrid cloud offerings.

This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.