The cloud is here to stay and organisations are now looking at long-term strategies to leverage the cloud and empower IT to enable them to realise their business and digital transformation goals.
What can we anticipate from the cloud in the long run, and how can businesses be guided on the correct path in terms of cloud planning? We have identified a few prevalent use cases among the early adopters of cloud solutions, and their long-term cloud strategies are as follows:
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- Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery
The cloud has undoubtedly revolutionised Disaster Recovery (DR), delivering advantages that include greater flexibility, scalability, cost-effectiveness and ease of deployment compared to more traditional approaches. However, one common problem is the diversity and sprawl of today’s IT environments, which makes disaster recovery a complex challenge. Therefore, a vital long-term strategy would be to choose a DR platform that not only lowers business risk but also optimises your investments and simplifies operations through the use of automation and provides consistency across production and DR sites.
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- Data Centre Extension
Cloud solutions let organisations use the public cloud as an extension of their own data centres, taking advantage of the cloud’s scalability and flexibility to adapt to a variety of IT and business requirements. This can be achieved if the organisation can easily move workloads between data centres and the cloud, increase capacity to handle temporary surges in traffic, and create and launch hybrid apps that can communicate with both on-premises and cloud-based resources. Even though there are numerous upsides to extending data centres, doing so is often not easy. Compatibility concerns and the need to re-architect older programmes are two of the main obstacles. Only by addressing these concerns can organisations maximise the benefits of both their on-prem and cloud environments.
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- Cloud Migrations
Cloud migration entails securely and efficiently shifting software applications, databases, and other IT resources to the cloud. It is a popular strategy for updating outdated software and databases and increasing the scalability and availability of software services. Yet, there are a slew of challenges that organisations may encounter on their way to the cloud, such as incompatibilities, data migration difficulties, security concerns, vendor lock-ins, integration issues, and cost projections. The success of a business’ cloud migration depends on careful planning and preparation for potential obstacles, including a thorough evaluation of the company’s objectives and goals for the migration and the selection of a cloud configuration that matches those needs.
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- Application Modernisation
Today’s businesses can’t realise the rewards of recent advancements in technology without first modernising their legacy applications. It’s a great way to ensure the longevity of their long-trusted systems and software. With a number of approaches such as “lift and shift,” “refactoring,” and “re-platforming” to consider, each with its own pros and cons, assessing prospective applications and creating a long-term modernisation strategy are crucial steps in successfully modernising legacy software. Keep in mind that tools like cloud infrastructure, containerisation, and microservices are at the heart of application modernisation. Data-driven modernisation solutions, as well as a shift toward modularity and cloud-native architectures, are becoming increasingly popular in successful app modernisation endeavours.
Planning Ahead With VMware Cloud on AWS
In order to enable businesses to make their long-term cloud strategies and aspirations a reality, VMware Cloud (VMC) on AWS, an integrated cloud offering jointly developed by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware, was developed. What’s powerful about VMware Cloud on AWS is that it can provide organisations with consistent and interoperable infrastructure and services between their data centres and the cloud, thereby minimising the complexity and associated risks of managing diverse environments. And you can get this powerful solution with the help of Pro-Datech, a provider of next-generation enterprise cloud solutions and IT integration with a nearly 20-year partnership wih VMware itself. Visit the page here to have a chat with Pro-Datech
Some of the biggest advantages provided by VMware Cloud on AWS include:
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- Rapid, cost-effective and low-risk migration: VMware Cloud on AWS allows for migrations with zero downtime, large-scale migrations and prescriptive migration workflows that do not require any mandatory application refactoring or infrastructure retrofit.
- Hybrid cloud with consistent infrastructure and operations: With VMware Cloud on AWS, businesses can enjoy the same vSphere infrastructure and familiar, single-pane-of-glass management as they do on-premises, as well as secure WAN optimised and stretched L2 networks. This allows for a consistent experience across both on-premises and cloud environments.
- Simplified disaster protection: VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery and VMware Site Recovery, accelerates time-to-protection, simplifies disaster recovery operations and reduces secondary site costs with cloud economics while providing a secondary site that is operationally consistent with your on-prem data centre.
- Enterprise-grade availability and optimisation: VMware Cloud on AWS offers predictable, high-performance compute and elastic, policy-driven resource management, as well as enterprise-grade L2 and L3 networking. It also includes policy-driven enterprise storage services and built-in resiliency for VM, host, and AZ failures, ensuring high levels of availability and optimisation.
Ready to take the next step? Then it is time to explore VMware Cloud on AWS with Pro-Datech, whose extensive expertise with VMware and cloud migration can help you make the most out of your cloud journey, address the challenges you might face and strategise for the future. Acquired by the Cloudaron Group in 2016, Pro-Datech is also uniquely positioned to augment and expand the cloud solutioning capabilities of any organisation that wishes to derive value from cloud computing.
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