Summary: Migrating workloads to the cloud allows enterprises to take advantage of infrastructure that can scale according to changing demands, with payment only for the resources used. Cloud platforms are not locked into fixed on-premises environments but offer a level of flexibility that ensures greater efficiency and lower overall costs. During this process, businesses can fully leverage the unique innovations and features offered by public cloud services.
However, why are only 10% of virtual machines actually used across the three major public clouds? Clearly, the biggest obstacle businesses face is the actual work and cost involved in migrating applications to the cloud platform. In reality, changing an enterprise’s IT operations can be both difficult and expensive. Enterprises may need to rewrite existing applications while still providing all the typical enterprise IT support operations that include monitoring, troubleshooting, network connectivity, security, backup, disaster recovery, auditing, compliance, and all other necessary functions.
When enterprises initially migrate their business to the cloud with the goal of saving costs, the attraction may not be as strong.
Cloud Computing Expectations
Many of the enterprise’s application workloads have already been virtualized. Therefore, it should be possible to seamlessly move them into a secure, non-shared, private environment while still fully controlling all applications, policies, billing, and security using existing tools and skills. Once in the cloud, enterprises want to fully leverage all the native cloud services, such as AI and data analytics.
IT departments expect to not have to worry about infrastructure, saving time, resources, and funds. Enterprises can rely on cloud providers to support the infrastructure, allowing their teams to focus on applications, workloads, and business needs.
Ideally, there should be a way to lift an enterprise’s on-premises applications to the cloud in full, without requiring significant changes or loss of functionality. This would be the most cost-effective method and eliminate the biggest barrier to cloud adoption.
What’s Possible Today
Currently, both AWS and Microsoft Azure support solutions that allow VMware virtualized workloads to be migrated to the public cloud. These solutions provide the benefits of a native VMware environment in isolated environments within the public cloud:
- They allow businesses to deploy a native, independent, single-tenant VMware environment in a dedicated public cloud.
- They allow businesses to use their existing vSphere tools to manage the environment. This approach gives businesses access to native VMware instances in the public cloud, which are not semi-virtualized or nested virtualization but run natively on bare-metal infrastructure.
By adopting Azure, businesses can integrate VMware management directly within the Azure portal, allowing users to manage all VMware operations.
Providing IT administrators with the same tools they’ve already used on-premises, along with cloud computing, can immediately save significant costs as they don’t need to learn new tools or processes. For example, integration with the Azure portal allows administrators to use existing VMware tools to monitor, adjust memory, configure, and manage both public and private virtual machines directly from the portal.
Migrating the on-premises VMware environment to Azure offers several advantages, such as:
- Full Integration with Azure Portal: Provides the ability to manage VMware directly from the familiar Azure portal.
- Enhanced Permissions: Allows businesses to implement third-party software like Zerto for backup solutions, a benefit exclusive to Azure.
- Immediate Cost Benefits:
- Seamless Transition of Virtualized Workloads: The ability to move enterprise workloads to a private cloud brings new cost and operational efficiencies. For instance, there’s no need to refactor applications for the cloud environment. Additionally, software vendors often offer discounts for cloud migration.
- Valuable Opportunities for Managing Costs: Provides a seamless way to transfer production workloads to the cloud, creating many valuable opportunities for cost management.
Opportunities:
- On-demand Resource Usage: Use resources as needed and pay by the hour or month. Alternatively, take advantage of one- or three-year reserved models offered by public cloud providers for greater discounts.
- Improved IT Efficiency: Quickly configure the entire VMware environment in minutes (instead of days) to get up and running fast.
- Extended Security Support for Windows Server 2008 and SQL 2008: Azure cloud provides extended security support for these platforms, saving time to refactor applications over the next three years.
- Flexible Host Management: Quickly and easily add or remove hosts based on seasonal or unexpected demand, enabling businesses to only pay for the infrastructure they need when they need it.
- Significant Reduction in Data Center Maintenance Capital Costs: These cost savings can be reinvested into operational expenses. With many businesses’ data center leases expiring soon, there is increasing pressure to quickly migrate to the cloud for strategic goals and cost savings.
Migrating enterprise operations to the cloud is indeed a more efficient way to manage costs compared to traditional data centers. However, this efficiency depends on how seamlessly and easily these workloads can be lifted into the cloud. Once in the cloud, new opportunities for cost savings, scalability, and smarter business strategies arise.