As IT teams seek to move more of their mission-critical applications to hybrid cloud environments, they are facing growing pressure to reduce complexity in managing, securing and scaling their enterprise networks.
While public cloud providers are responsible for the networks within their infrastructures, IT remains responsible for the networks that connect the enterprise to public cloud services, as well as within hybrid and private cloud on-premises infrastructure.
In today’s environment, network complexity can be a nightmare, particularly as you grow your business and embrace multicloud strategies. Most organizations end up with a hornet’s nest of different switches, servers, firewalls and other solutions that don’t always talk to one another and make it nearly impossible to ensure performance, security, availability and scalability with any level of consistency.
Modernizing the network architecture
The answer to reduced complexity is a network architecture that provides a single layer of infrastructure from the branch to the core to the cloud, ensuring end-to-end connectivity and intrinsic security. That means a network built on a software-defined architecture with centralized management, control and security policy at the virtualization layer.
In the cloud era, think of this software-defined network (SDN) architecture as step one in network modernization. Step two is to take that same software-defined architecture you are using for your on-premises hybrid and private cloud infrastructure and move it to the public cloud.
This will give you a seamless, integrated network architecture for all of your hybrid cloud workloads. It will dramatically reduce complexity, significantly improve security and give you an opportunity to successfully move virtually any workload to any cloud—including mission-critical databases, containers and microservices for development teams, and branch and edge computing environments that empower workforces wherever they are located.
IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions: Bringing VMware Environments to the Public Cloud
This IDC White Paper highlights the strengths of the IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions and illustrates how it offers a secure and flexible path to public cloud and to broader digital transformation.
Download NowWhat to look for now
To achieve this next level of a seamless, integrated network for your hybrid cloud environment, you need two things: a vendor that provides a proven and reliable SDN architecture and a cloud provider that lets you extend that architecture into its public cloud environment.
Welcome to the next stage in the ongoing partnership between VMware and IBM Cloud. The two companies recently announced that IBM Private Cloud now supports VMware’s NSX-T Data Center SDN product. For customers, there are many advantages to this, including the ability to:
- Seamlessly migrate and modernize mission-critical applications in the hybrid cloud.
- Empower cloud-native applications with a consistent network architecture across private and public clouds.
- Improve security and accelerate development cycles by managing and deploying NSX-T security policies consistently across virtual machines and containers.
- Leverage the SDN expertise and best practices of VMware, with more than 7,500 NSX customers and more than 80 million virtualization switch ports.
- Leverage the cloud expertise of IBM Cloud, with more than 1,700 customers, as well as IBM’s decades of experience serving the unique needs of enterprise customers across the globe.
Conclusion
As organizations look to move more and more of their mission-critical applications to the cloud, they must invest in on-premises solutions that simplify the cloud journey and work in seamless concert with the leading public cloud providers.
Networking is an area of particular concern for IT decision-makers now, because there is a strong need to reduce network complexity and make it simpler to secure, scale and manage networks in the future.
By leveraging solutions from VMware and IBM Cloud, IT teams can take advantage of a modern network architecture that simplifies the migration of mission-critical workloads to the cloud, while accelerating the development of applications and improving their security.
