Streamlined modernisation can unlock innovation, savings
The cloud is the foundation for today’s agile, flexible infrastructures. However, the majority of organisations still have considerable legacy environments running business applications on premises, with 80% market share and more than 60 million workloads worldwide on-premise using the VMware vSphere ecosystem.
Many customers are still operating their business with VMware on premises, and have invested years building complex application platforms with deep interdependencies. Now, IT leaders are looking at the higher-level services that can be found in Cloud native solutions. But migrating these workloads can be a daunting task.
A number of different reasons, ranging from regulatory through financial to organisational, combine to put significant pressure on companies to optimise their environments. But due to the critical nature of their workloads, for many enterprises the sense of urgency to migrate to the cloud can be offset by a fear of the unknown.
In some cases, companies choose to play it safe by leaving the most important, mission-critical applications to last. Executive buy-in for the cloud migration strategy is very important. In the short term, the migration drives big changes in the way the IT systems are managed, potentially leading to operational disruption. However, cloud migration will not only save costs and achieve operational improvements, but crucially unlock the potential for the whole organization to innovate.
Business-IT alignment critical
Without the proper alignment between business and IT, the risk and opportunity profile of a cloud migration project can be misjudged, with short-term challenges and perceived risks potentially outweighing long-term benefits. It is essential for organisations to understand that they must capitalise on the power of the cloud for all of their applications, and that it is in their interest as a business to modernise as soon as possible.
Through its partnership with AWS, VMware delivers fully modernised infrastructure as a service, optimised for tier-one applications. As a result, customers can embrace the power of cloud not just for specific applications that they have built for running new digital services, but also for all of their tier-one enterprise applications. This allows them to instantly modernise their entire infrastructure. Customers don’t have to choose between staying in private cloud or moving to public cloud anymore, they can have both. VMware Cloud on AWS is the fabric that connects the best of private cloud with VMware to the best of public cloud with AWS.
While AWS is the biggest cloud provider, it is important for some businesses to feel free to use the cloud of their choice. With VMware Cloud on AWS customers can easily migrate to the AWS Cloud and then modernise their applications after they have migrated. They can still benefit from the investments they have made in infrastructure and in skills for VMware while having access to innovations from the 200+-plus cloud services from AWS such as AI, Data services, BI, and IOT solutions.
With the right support and the most appropriate migration plan, organisations that are already running VMware on-premises on Intel® Xeon® processor-based servers can feel confident that they will continue to benefit from the same Intel software optimisations and rigorous application testing in VMware Cloud for AWS, leading to consistent and predictable application performance.
Cloud migrations of vSphere workloads can be accelerated from months or years to weeks or days with familiar, consistent infrastructure that eliminates the need to redesign applications. As well as reducing the complexity, cost and risk of cloud migrations compared with alternatives that require time and scarce skills, VMware and AWS services allow for the modernisation of apps to be carried out at the most appropriate pace for each organisation, once in the cloud.
For more information on the options of migrating to VMC on AWS, AWS offers Migration Readiness Assessment and an Optimization and Licensing Assessment that will show the cost after moving to the AWS cloud and the impact on cost of third party licenses.