Modernizing VMware Investments Across Hybrid Cloud Infrastructures
As transformation initiatives are executed to be more responsive to citizens and patients, IT staffs will be tasked with leveraging virtualization capabilities to integrate resources across heterogenous infrastructures.
Existing investments in VMware will provide a solid platform for ensuring portability and interoperability to ensure that the rate workloads are on the right resources to produce the best results.
The move to a strategic embrace of integrated, hybrid multi-cloud infrastructures represents a major opportunity to redefine the relationships that IT organizations have with the rest of the business.
As government agency leaders and healthcare administrators execute their transformation initiatives to be more responsive to citizens and patients, IT staff will be tasked with leveraging virtualization capabilities to integrate resources across heterogeneous infrastructures. Existing investments in VMware will provide a solid platform for ensuring portability and interoperability to ensure that the rate workloads are on the right resources to produce the best results.
BizTechReports recently caught up with Shep Sheppard and Joe Murphy from IBM to discuss how organizations are harnessing investments in virtualization to support enterprise infrastructure modernization initiatives across legacy systems, modern data centers as well as private and public cloud resources.
Here is what they had to say:
The move to a strategic embrace of integrated, hybrid multi-cloud infrastructures represents a major opportunity to redefine the relationships that IT organizations have with the rest of the business. That is why it is so important to make a strategic commitment to beginning with the end in mind.
Initial investments in virtualization decades ago created a major opportunity to get more value out of infrastructure. It causes many IT leaders to rethink the foundational relationship between data, applications, and underlying infrastructure. The same opportunity is now presented to change the context of IT in a services-oriented architecture (SOA) environment.
That is why it is so important to avoid oversimplified lift and shift decisions. Moving a system to the cloud is not the same as developing a cloud system. When you do a lift and shift, you can actually wind up with the same system but with slower performance, less reliability, and higher costs. A strategic shift to modern platforms requires an understanding of the new metrics that matter. If you can do the effective re-engineering to take advantage of cloud-specific attributes, organizations can leverage investments in virtualization to extend more flexibility and visibility across the enterprise.
The argument was made that organizations with experience in on-premises virtualization have a leg up in the move to embrace hybrid-cloud environments. It provides an operational framework for data and mobility that will be important in a complex heterogeneous infrastructure. Organizations that have become fluent in having VMware here, VMware there, and can pick up workloads to move them around, will be in a good position to understand and optimize containerization across different flavors of the cloud.
Establishing effective governance, audit, and risk management processes that work together across legacy, on-prem and cloud-based resources will be a key success factor. “It is the only way to leverage investments in a risk-adjusted manner.” The new hybrid environment changes many things. Regardless of what is operated on-prem versus the cloud, however, the most important issues to resolve will revolve around resiliency, redundancy, disaster recovery, and cyber security.
The move to support hybrid cloud infrastructures has reignited Geoffrey Moore’s seminal discussion about what is core and what is context when it comes to IT and the enterprise. The last time this conversation emerged with this level of intensity was when virtualization changed the rules of infrastructure optimization in the early-to-mid 2000s. As organizations today look for ways to elevate agility, resilience and innovation, extending virtualized environments into the cloud will raise new -- but familiar -- questions. What is it that we do? What kind of IT shop are we? Are we going to focus on servers and licenses to build up storage and network capacity? Or is there a different way to actually focus on the core business?
To this end, executives spend quite a bit of time discussing the implications of shifting operational responsibilities to the cloud and managed services providers. By shifting functions to the cloud, many aspects associated with “keeping the lights on” can be reallocated. It was also noted, however, that moving functions does not actually result in shifting responsibilities...internal IT leaders are still left to face the music if things go wrong regardless of who performs any given function.
The good news is that both cloud and managed services have matured greatly in recent years -- especially the past 12 months. For a long time, compliance in highly regulated industries had a bias for on-premises operations. Attitudes and perspectives have changed. Now compliance seems to be moving to the cloud. If you want to be more compliant, the cloud may be a better first choice...even for sensitive operations.
This line of thinking opens the door to a vibrant set of discussions about the kinds of skill sets, operational areas of expertise and functional responsibilities that enterprise IT should master. Virtualization, combined with emerging technologies like AI/ML, automation, and big data analytics offers the opportunity to manage far-flung and fragmented hybrid environments by abstracting logical processes and applications from the underlying infrastructure across organizations.
For more information on BizTechReport podcast interviews, please contact Melissa Fisher at MFisher@BizTechReports.com.