The Value of Extending IT Infrastructure to the Public Cloud

Companies are working to transform themselves digitally, and there is perhaps no more important driver than the cloud. However, as more and more companies are discovering, there’s no single path when it comes to moving to the cloud. Rather, an effective digital transformation strategy integrates private, hybrid and, perhaps most importantly, public clouds.

 In a recent survey of its customers, VMware found that 67 percent foresee an ideal “end state” in which they rely on multiple clouds. And while many companies have dipped their toes into SaaS and private cloud waters, increasing development, data analysis, security and general market demands are driving the need for companies to extend their IT environments to public clouds.

 With all this said, integrating public clouds is not for the faint of heart. The key challenges are:

· Reducing inefficiencies from managing multiple cloud silos: While companies most certainly can benefit from using a combination of private, public and hybrid

clouds, this can also result in complex, siloed environments that lack common management tools and security.

· Transitioning existing workloads to the public cloud: Companies know that they will gain flexibility, agility and cost savings from the public cloud, but it can be challenging to migrate legacy applications that are running on-premises in order to realize a return on investment.

· Developing and deploying cloud-native applications: Businesses need a unified infrastructure that supports both legacy and modern applications based on containers and micro-services to help move new applications and services to production faster.

VMware solutions provide customers the ability to leverage multiple cloud environments while reducing cost and complexity. The VMware Cloud Foundation offers a dynamic software-defined infrastructure to run enterprise applications in both private and public environments.

 VMware supports business agility, resilience, scale, and choice by extending datacenters to the public cloud with solutions such as VMware Cloud™ on Amazon Web Services (AWS). In addition, the global network of VMware Cloud Provider™ partners, including IBM Cloud, delivers public cloud services based on trusted VMware technology and are designed to interoperate with customers’ on-premises VMware deployments.

VMware and its partners are working with organizations of all sizes and across industries to improve operations and customer experiences by extending infrastructure to the public cloud. For example, VMware’s work with a company in the hospitality industry resulted in enhanced guest services with a modernized data center, faster time to market for new services, and a scalable, cost-effective strategy for supporting growth while empowering employees with the latest digital capabilities.

VMware also helped the organization overcome a common concern about the public cloud: security. Utilizing VMware NSX, the company has been able to simplify network management and enable higher levels of security by leveraging micro-segmentation. 

Of course, any organization’s success in modernizing IT architecture, while balancing security with flexibility, requires a deep knowledge of what is—and isn’t—happening on legacy systems. Enter VMware’s Virtual Network Assessment (VNA), which helps partners provide their customers with a holistic view of the traffic in their data center across the virtual and physical domains. Click here to learn more about the VNA.

Extending infrastructure to the cloud is not an easy journey, but it’s certainly worth the ride.

This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.