Going Private With the VMware Foundation Cloud

Cloud usage has witnessed an extraordinary surge. Gartner predicts that by 2025, more than half of enterprise IT spending will pivot to the cloud as businesses enthusiastically embrace its myriad benefits, ranging from enhanced scalability and cost-effectiveness to heightened data security and accelerated innovation opportunities.

However, the public cloud may not always suit an organisation’s specific needs. There are, for instance, apps and workloads that may need to reside on-prem either due to compliance requirements or because of integration and cost considerations. These include:

• Financial services applications: Given the sensitive nature of customers’ financial data and strict regulatory compliance, on-premises hosting is often preferred.
• Healthcare applications: Patient records and privacy regulations make on-premises solutions essential in this industry.
• Government applications: Security concerns and sensitive information handling make on-prem hosting the go-to choice for government agencies.
• Manufacturing applications: Proprietary production processes and stringent data control position on-premises solutions as the premier choice in the manufacturing sector.
• Retail applications: Customer data, inventory management, and data privacy concerns often drive the use of on-premises setups.

Additionally, an organisation might need to move its apps and workloads between different environments over time, based on demand and consumption patterns.

In such cases, what organisations need is a self-service private cloud environment that enables IT teams to abstract needed services and provide whatever the organisation needs—all while retaining the flexibility to move resources where they are needed. Unfortunately, there are major challenges to building and delivering this kind of environment, including the following:

• High capital costs, and lengthy deployment time. Building anything from scratch takes time, and the costs are considerable given the need to invest in hardware and software and continuously configure and maintain disparate systems.
• Downtime. Integrating automation platforms with existing infrastructure can result in disruptions and downtimes.
• Skills shortage. Automating existing IT resources might require new skill sets—something that might not be readily available within the organisation.

Find out more about VMware Cloud Foundation HERE.

Going Private With VMware Cloud Foundation

Organisations running VMware Cloud-based data centres are at a distinct advantage should they want to transform their data centre into a truly modern private cloud with self-service consumption and delivery capabilities. That’s because they can use VMware Cloud Foundation for that very purpose.

VMware Cloud Foundation is a highly advanced hybrid cloud platform that provides a complete range of software-defined services for computing, storage, networking, security and cloud management to run enterprise apps of any kind in private or public environments. At the heart of it is vRealize Automation, a modern infrastructure automation platform that provides both self-service consumption and the private cloud’s resource delivery layer, thus transforming any VMware Cloud-based data centre into a modern, self-service private cloud.

Figure 1. Delivering a self-service consumption and delivery layer for private clouds based on VMware Cloud Foundation.

The Biggest Benefits of VMware Cloud Foundation

Upon installation, the VMware Cloud Foundation enables IT teams to instantiate a self-service private cloud that supports modern use cases quickly and easily through these capabilities:

• Self-service catalogue. Set up a self-service catalogue with out-of-the-box content and provision new resources using VMware Cloud Templates, vRealize Orchestrator™ workflows, infrastructure and app pipelines and Action-Based Extensibility (ABX) actions.
• Infrastructure as code. Define machines, applications and services created on VMware Cloud infrastructure resources, design and deploy standardised cloud templates on any supported VMware Cloud endpoint and add ecosystem constructs, like VMware NSX-T™ networking and Kubernetes clusters.
• Software configuration management. Define optimised, secure software states and then enforce them across the entire private cloud environment via flexible, intuitive configuration automation.
• VMware Cloud infrastructure automation. Configure a VMware Cloud Foundation cloud account as an endpoint to use workload domains and set up catalogue items. Additionally, apply appropriate security groups and storage policies with just one click—all while the platform automates the underlying VMware Cloud infrastructure constructs to reduce complexity.

Get the Benefits of VMware Cloud Foundation Now

VMware Cloud Foundation is a modern solution that enables self-service consumption and delivery of private cloud resources. It offers quick time to value that gives users and developers a unified and consistent self-service layer so that organisations can leverage the advantages of having a private cloud at their disposal.

Click here to find out more about the VMware Cloud Foundation.