VMware’s announcement on 31st March grabbed the headlines, and so it should.
At its simplest, this is VMware doing what they’re best known for – technology abstraction. Where VMware has ruled the roost as the hypervisor of choice in the data centre, these new services position them as the hypervisor for cloud.
And they’re pushing on open door.
Multi-cloud is conclusively in demand, as identified in Flexera’s recently released 2021 State of the Cloud Report, which found 92 percent of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy and, on average, survey respondents use 2.6 public and 2.7 private clouds. That’s a clear statement of desire for multi-cloud.
One stumbling block though is support and management – a multi-cloud architecture is inherently more complex. Operating on multiple clouds means multiple environments to secure and maintain with staff needing to be proficient on different cloud platforms and consoles.
VMware’s offering aims to do away with that by providing a single pane of glass and deployment methodology across all clouds, public and private. This enables true application portability with the added advantage of being able to take advantage of a particular public cloud provider’s strengths – for example AI or big data - without having to go all-in with that vendor. Perhaps it really is possible to have your cake and eat it?
Tanzu provides an exciting method to modernise applications but the flaw in the plan is that most organisations don’t understand what applications they have, and any view they do have is typically limited to a list of servers in a data centre. This was highlighted in the Flexera survey where many respondents report challenges understanding app dependencies and assessing technical feasibility.
These challenges on their own are one thing, the compound effect of those challenges is what impedes most organisations' migrations.
First generation cloud migration tools are of limited use for application mapping. Whilst they can quickly produce up-to-date lists of servers, they struggle to determine what the application is that's running on those servers. More importantly, they provide no understanding of the application’s purpose or business context.
Knowing what an application is or does is critical to effective migration and modernisation onto cloud platforms. It’s essential to determine what’s business critical, what contains confidential data, what the dependencies are and so on.
Otherwise, you’ll just end up lifting-and-shifting servers and using the cloud as another data centre. An expensive proposition.
This is what the AppScore platform is designed to do: build an application-centric view of your portfolio and use the data points on those applications in smart ways to automatically determine routes to cloud and scoring for risk, complexity, and benefit. What we call the science behind cloud migration.
Application transformation is an expensive activity that requires careful planning and prioritisation, so AppScore uses the application data picture to produce costed transformation schedules with dependency tracking.
There’s no faster way to assess, plan and execute cloud migration or application modernisation.
The result? You get a data-based transformation strategy that'll allow your business to get in the cloud with complete confidence.
If you're ready to find out the true power of AppScore, request a demo today.
