The Key to Managing Complexity and Risk in a Multi-Cloud World
Cloud adoption in the enterprise is accelerating at a near breakneck pace. In what is becoming a common trend, enterprises worldwide are racing to adopt cloud technology in response to a myriad of business needs—revenue generation, improving business applications, better decision-making—to make their organizations more profitable and effective.
Further fueling this growth in cloud adoption is the pressure to create applications that work effectively in an increasingly hybridized cloud environment. The lines between private, public, and hybrid cloud are blurring, and their distinctions are becoming less relevant. “Customers want to deploy to any cloud without regard to location,” says Mike Hulme, senior director of VMware Cloud marketing. “They want a simple cloud strategy to manage complexity and risk as they work across multiple clouds.”
Business and IT leaders have traditionally spoken different languages, with goals, objectives, and priorities often in conflict with each other. But as the cloud matures, the enterprise has a set of technologies and tools that bring business and IT together. Cloud technology provides what both sides of the enterprise technology divide need to align around timelines and access to new levels of innovation, without jeopardizing any of the standard IT requirements—but only when done correctly.
The Right Way
Enterprises want the flexibility to develop any type of application, deploy it to any cloud, and deliver it to any device. When organizations introduce this degree of flexibility and heterogeneity into their IT environments, however, the level of complexity typically rises. And with rise in complexity comes a level of risk due to inconsistent security, management, and governance models. At the least, this can be a drain on efficiency while introducing unexpected costs. At worst, the security of intellectual property and customer information could be threatened.
“Accessing the kind of flexibility IT needs to drive business innovation, without introducing complexity and risk, is only possible when utilizing a consistent infrastructure and consistent set of operations,” Hulme says. “VMware delivers just this, with VMware’s cloud infrastructure operating in more than 4,000 partners across more than 100 countries worldwide.”
One Cloud Strategy
Through VMware Cloud™, enterprises gain access to a comprehensive set of cloud products and services, available on-premises or in the cloud. VMware Cloud unifies existing investments, resources, skills, and teams and allows a business to tap into the broadest set of cloud providers around the globe.
VMware’s cloud strategy also tackles head-on the fact that application development, particularly containerized (cloud-native) app development, is more demanding than ever. VMware Cloud provides the optimal stable environment for compute, storage, and networking—creating the best infrastructure environment for these applications. In addition, VMware delivers the kind of operational support, cloud services, and other investments that, until now, have been missing from cloud-native apps.
Announced this morning at VMworld, VMware is providing the resources, tools, and building blocks to satisfy what containerized applications need in production. VMware’s approach will accelerate enterprise adoption of containers and allow companies to get more value, faster, out of containerized apps.
VMware’s cloud strategy also takes aim at the silos that have traditionally existed between the data center and the cloud. VMware Cloud delivers consistent infrastructure across clouds, creating a more seamless extension of the data center to the cloud, reducing costs and effort, and creating new opportunities for customers to work across the clouds that best fit their business needs.
*This article originally taken from VMware/radius
