The journey to the cloud has not always been smooth. Nearly 80% of organizations have repatriated a critical workload back from the public cloud to a private cloud or on-premises infrastructure, according to Enterprise Strategy Group.
In today’s environment, IT needs more assurance that their migration strategy will be successful. As many organizations have discovered, using a consistent, familiar hybrid cloud operational model across all environments delivers major benefits in reducing risk and accelerating digital transformation.
In most cases, the path to a consistent hybrid cloud starts with VMware as the foundation. The reason is simple: Most business-critical apps are already hosted on VMware and most organizations have administrators with extensive VMware skills and experience.
It’s not just software, of couse. Having modern infrastructure that is software-defined, simple to scale and migrate with best-of-breed performance and agility is equally critical.
The tightly integrated partnership between VMware and Dell Technologies has made migrating to the hybrid cloud simpler and less risky as a central element in their product development strategy. IT teams can use the same software-defined infrastructure platform, VMware Cloud Foundation across Dell Technologies infrastructure, from the data center to the edge to multiple clouds.
What are some of the key ways this path reduces risk?
- Organizations don’t have to go through lengthy, expensive and risky refactoring processes in modernizing mission-critical applications. They can modernize at their own pace and use a single architecture that supports both traditional VM development as well as containerized development using Kubernetes as the orchestration platform.
- IT teams can take advantage of existing skills, processes and technologies to migrate to the hybrid cloud, without the organization taking on the risk of hiring new teams or requiring new skill sets. Critical functions such as security protections, policy enforcement, updates and patches, troubleshooting and monitoring are all centralized and managed by IT.
- Organizations can limit the inherent risks of information silos that stem from having separate cloud platforms and/or uncontrolled shadow IT. Risks include gaps in security, IT governance and compliance. Perhaps just as dangerous, information silos inhibit digital transformation and prevent the company from using all of its data for big data analytics to drive competitive advantage.
- IT can improve operational efficiencies to reduce costs; deploy extensive automation to reduce risk of human error; and lower capital expenses by leveraging existing investments and moving to a cloud consumption model for hybrid cloud infrastructure. IT can leverage software-defined technologies across Dell servers, storage, networking, hyperconverged and converged infrastructure to empower a “future-ready” business.
Success Stories in Hybrid Cloud
Atea is the market leader in IT infrastructure for businesses and public-sector organization’s in Europe’s Nordic and Baltic regions, with approximately 7,400 employees and 4,000 consultants. The company has modernized with VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail, the Dell Technologies Cloud Platform. This has made it simple to “lift and shift” applications and infrastructure to the cloud, while also providing a platform for customers to develop new cloud-native applications and services in Kubernetes. Atea’s customers have seen huge benefits operational efficiencies and IT transformation: A hospital has dramatically reduced the time to update medical records, for example; a customer in the public sector has transformed its business by providing needed services 24 hours a day, rather than just from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Cybera serves businesses that have minimal IT support at their remote locations. It delivers a cloud-based managed service using a software-defined networking solution running on Dell EMC PowerEdge Servers. Key to the company’s transformation has been the ability to provide SD-WAN services with advanced security on a cloud platform. One customer had to network 6,000 locations as quickly as possible; with the cloud and SD-WAN, the network enhancements rolled out in just two weeks.
Unwinding the Complexity of Multiple Clouds
This paper explores the benefits of adopting a consistent hybrid cloud approach to multiple cloud environments and offers advice on how to structure it effectively to overcome multicloud complexity.
Download NowRevelation Software Concepts embraced hybrid cloud as a way to transform its business model by modernizing data protection, backup and recovery. The company was attempting to grow by adding a cloud-hosted offering, but their legacy data protection solution wasn’t up to the task: It was slow, unreliable and did not offer the cloud-readiness needed to meet customer SLAs, protect their own site or develop a trusted cloud disaster recovery strategy. With a combination of Dell EMC Integrated Data Protection Appliance, Dell EMC Cloud Disaster Recovery and VMware Cloud on AWS, Revelation has reduced weekend backup windows by 94%, reduced local storage by 54%, enabled cloud-agnostic restores, and reduced the need for training though the use of familiar tools and skill sets.
Nol-Tec Systems turned to a hybrid cloud solution to address infrastructure challenges caused by underperforming servers and inconsistencies across platforms. The company migrated seamlessly using VMware Cloud Foundation with Dell PowerEdge Servers. Since the transition, Nol-Tec has increased agility and reduced IT overhead by having a private cloud in the data center and using the same interface to move workloads to a public cloud when that is a better choice. Performance has improved dramatically, and the company can now efficiently manage both the public and private cloud using the same tools and infrastructure.
Conclusion
While the journey to the cloud has not always been smooth in the past, there is no reason it should not be smooth in the present or the future. IT teams can now use a consistent platform from the data center to the edge to the cloud to transform their businesses, modernize applications, simplify operations and reduce risk. Please visit Dell Technologies to find out more. https://www.delltechnologies.com/en-us/solutions/vmware/index.htm
