Ensuring tangible business outcomes with VMware Cloud Foundation

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by Nick Cross, VP SDDC EMEA

The demand for better, faster and more powerful services are driving an application explosion – to the extent that the number created in the five years ending 2023 will be greater than the number built in the previous four decades. More than ever before, we’re seeing organisations rapidly deploy new services in order to meet evolving business needs.

To deploy them requires a diverse infrastructure landscape, as enterprises continue their transformation and applications themselves demand a multitude of different environments. From on-premises for mission critical legacy services, to private and public cloud for native applications and distributed workloads that may be running at the edge.

This brings with it challenges – from the demands and complexity of multiple clouds and on-premises platforms, to security issues, skills shortages, potentially spiralling costs and obstacles (including as traditional silos between developers and operations) that hinder the development and deployment of applications.

Driving business outcomes with a true cloud foundation

What’s needed is a way to increase developer productivity while maintaining security and IT control. That gives businesses the simplified infrastructure they need, with a consistent way to operate, develop and manage modern applications across whichever clouds they choose.

But what does a platform like that need to deliver? In short, there are four key business outcomes from using such a solution:

The ability to develop and deploy applications and infrastructure faster – as organisations raise to deliver a high-quality user experience, they need to be able to deploy applications quickly. The days of taking six months to develop a new service are gone – today’s enterprise needs to be able to get services to market at speed, using whatever platform that delivers the best performance. That requires giving developers the freedom to deliver applications to any cloud and support them in using technologies, such as containers and Kubernetes, which enable that faster production and delivery.
Build a bridge between developers and IT and avoid operational silos – the objectives of developers and IT have often come into conflict, but in the cloud era, the resulting silos now threaten to undermine the investment in new environments by curtailing their potential use. Enterprises need to be able to deploy a solution that meet both the needs of developers under pressure to build cloud native applications fast while managing costs, resources and security within the corporate governance of IT.
Lower total cost of ownership – when cloud computing was first introduced, the low capital expenditure model was seen as a major benefit, allowing businesses to deploy new applications without upfront capital investment, moving instead to an operational expense model. Many learned the hard way that these opex costs can escalate quickly, with early capex savings dwarfed by increased cloud costs, causing the Total Cost of Ownership to grow dramatically. It’s therefore vital that the solution deployed delivers a lower total cost of ownership, delivering the balance between private and public clouds, keeping overall expenditure as low as possible.
Deliver a Cloud operating model that utilizes consistent infrastructure, based on software-defined compute, networking and storage to maximize agility and flexibility for dynamic application requirements. Consistent infrastructure leads to a consistent operational model that provides a basis to automate processes and streamline IT operations That’s why being able to manage all of it in a consistent manner is vital to ensuring a stable foundation for the deployment of traditional and modern apps.

VMware Cloud Foundation – the cornerstone of hybrid cloud

VMware Cloud Foundation delivers each of these business outcomes to organisations across the world. For instance, ITQ, the independent VMware knowledge partner, wanted to support its customers in getting services to market quickly, with a technology platform that is easily deployed, managed and capable of running deep learning, distributed learning, and other modern workloads. “This is where the integration of vSphere with Kubernetes and VMware Cloud Foundation can provide so much value,” said Johan Van Amersfoort, a Technologist in EUC and AI at ITQ.

Available as a consolidated, Hybrid Cloud platform, VMware Cloud Foundation is an integrated solution with high degrees of automation and orchestration for VM and container workloads, allowing organisations to meet their diverse needs, while protecting existing investments.

In short, VMware Cloud Foundation can span private and public environments, delivering the freedom to run apps anywhere without the cost, complexity or risk of application refactoring. Maintaining business continuity is paramount, it is the primary solution VMware has to support our customers to ensure they have the right infrastructure in place to support seamless operations.

The ubiquitous hybrid cloud platform for the modern application era

A strong hybrid cloud platform should allow IT to forge a stronger, more effective bond with the business. This enhances the way enterprises compete and differentiate themselves through services that keep organisations running, make business operations more efficient and make employees more effective in the way they serve customers.

VMware Cloud Foundation is that platform.

Take a look at the resources below to find out more: