Technology modernisation is a high priority for Europe’s CIOs as they strive to ensure their businesses can leverage AI to drive efficiency and boost growth. IDC reports that 56% of those surveyed at IDC’s annual CIO event said they are focusing on it right now. The top priority, cited by 77% of respondents, was implementing and scaling AI.
“It’s not surprising scaling AI is at the top of their agenda,” said Martyn Storey, EMEA Solution Architecture Leader, Amazon Web Services. “You can’t really do it without modernising what you’ve already got, so the two of those [priorities] definitely go hand in hand.”
He was speaking in a webcast hosted by Carla Arend, AVP, Cloud Research, Europe at IDC. She noted that 19% of European organisations are primarily operating on legacy systems and 40% are transitioning to cloud-native infrastructure. Only 6% are actively building AI-native platforms.
“Transitioning towards cloud-native infrastructure is imperative these days,” said Storey. “Around 95% of net new workloads are built in the cloud. The legacy is still significant, though. On-premises infrastructures predominantly run the businesses, typically on VMware technologies, running monolithic workloads.”
After acquiring VMware, Broadcom introduced licensing changes that are prompting many businesses to consider alternatives.
“It’s difficult to get off VMware,” says Storey. Many companies have been building on it for 20 years or more and it underpins many Oracle, SAP and .net workloads.
To make the journey easier, he proposes a phased approach, starting by rehosting some workloads in the cloud and gradually migrating workloads towards containers, cloud-native databases and serverless architectures. “I absolutely implore people who are looking to move their VMware workloads to the cloud to look long-term. Don’t just look at the lift and shift phase,” he says.
Watch the webcast to find out more about successful cloud migration for VMware.
