Moving to the cloud: It begins with applications
Why are applications so important?
Applications are a necessity for every modern organisation. For a business to provide quality products and services, it needs reliable and user-friendly applications supporting its day-to-day operations. Applications execute a function, perform a task or range of tasks, and often require user interactivity to do so. An application can be self-contained or designed around a group of programs that consist of a set of operations that runs the application for an end user. Applications have evolved to a point where they can now provide customers with a service experience on par with or superior to interacting with a human. This was a major turning point for organisations worldwide. Consider self-checkout retail stores. Previously, shopping was an interaction between a customer and a store clerk, but now many retail transactions take place between a self-checkout kiosk or even an application on a customers’ mobile device. Today, with the digital transformation occurring across all industries, organisations are increasingly empowered to take care of more of the operational aspects of running a business on their own. As a result, the nature and span of applications have had to evolve to keep up.
How do applications help drive strategy?
Increasingly, applications are deployed and operated across a diverse infrastructure landscape. With the pressure to deliver goods and services quicker, the increased dependence on applications is accelerating. In fact, more applications are expected to be deployed in the next five years than in the last 40 years. You must decide how to deploy, optimise, manage, and support your ever-evolving application portfolio, which drives a set of infrastructure decisions. Organisations are spending $1 million and countless resource hours to migrate 1,000 virtual machines (VMs) to the cloud. This is a significant investment to simply rewrite an application for another environment without driving true value and innovation. As a result, organisations need to avoid the creation of infrastructure silos and take an approach that ensures consistent infrastructure and operations regardless of the platform. And that is where the cloud comes in. In the past, businesses made large CapEx investments in the form of physical data centres, placing these in offices or co-location facilities to support compute, storage, and networking needs of their applications. Rather than rely on in-house data centres, organisations can now leverage the public cloud as an operational, subscription-based service. The cloud allows them to take advantage of economies of scale, outsource a range of operations and connect to a global network of servers with access to innovative new development services. The cloud is also an important component of app transformation initiatives, enabling organisations to modernise existing apps, integrate with cloud services, convert to cloud native architectures, and build additional value into the existing estate of applications.
Why should I migrate?
More organisations are realising the benefits of moving workloads to the cloud. 85% of organisations expect to have the majority of their workloads in the cloud by the end of 2020, while up to a quarter of organisations plan to be cloud-only. However, relying solely on the public cloud for all workloads isn’t always the ideal solution. It’s sometimes cheaper to maintain applications with specific dependencies on-premises, and many organisations require specific workloads remain in-house to adhere to compliance and data sovereignty regulations. The ideal infrastructure for the majority of organisations is one that includes both environments. The decision of whether or not to migrate is a strategic one and must be made case by case depending on the cost and complexity of migrating an application or data centre, and the benefits achieved once in the cloud. The ideal infrastructure for the majority of organisations is one that includes both environments, providing the stability and familiarity of on-premises, while jointly leveraging public cloud services and scalability. This is the hybrid cloud. Hybrid cloud migration can provide organisations with significant cost savings, with recent research by the Taneja group showing it’s typically 34% less expensive than public cloud refactoring.
Why VMware Cloud on AWS
VMware has developed a portfolio of services that addresses the cloud migration challenges many organisations are facing. With VMware Cloud, organisations can merge their on-premises environment with the cloud while removing compatibility and consistency challenges. Consistent operations across environments ensure that established policies and practices for security, automation and governance are preserved, protecting data and applications while minimising the operational requirements for IT. What’s more, the entire cloud solution is built on the most proven and broadly deployed infrastructure portfolio in the world. VMware Cloud enables consistent infrastructure and consistent operations, employing the same VMware tools and skillsets organisations already use on-premises in the cloud – allowing them to migrate quickly and with zero downtime. VMware Cloud on AWS bridges the gap between on-premises and the cloud, offering an integrated hybrid cloud that extends on-premises vSphere environments to a VMware SDDC running on AWS elastic, bare-metal infrastructure. This allows users to migrate applications or entire data centres quickly and confidently to AWS – the world’s largest public cloud.
SCC and AWS
SCC is a Public Sector Partner, Solution Provider, and Advanced Consulting Partner to AWS, helping customers to accelerate their journey to the cloud. The AWS Advanced Consulting Partner tier recognises Consulting Partners that have excelled in providing successful solutions on AWS. This includes providing extensive training to teams, having a 360-degree knowledge of AWS to manage projects effectively, and taking their clients to market with innovative, revenue-generating solutions. As an AWS Advanced partner, we are able to use our experience and knowledge to find new and better solutions for our customers and maximise our relationship with AWS.
Ready to take the next step on your cloud journey?
SCC’s Hyperscale business combines our expertise with your business knowledge to ensure you get the best from your public cloud investment. Before we get our hands dirty, we get to know your organisation, your goals and your existing technology and work alongside you to develop a unique business case. This understanding and partnership-based approach enables us to design the ideal environment for your business, deliver a smoother, faster migration and provide ongoing support as your technology needs evolve. Put simply; we deliver the solutions and skills so you can focus on innovating, capturing new opportunities and driving your business forward. Contact our highly experienced team via the form below, who will learn about your requirements and identify how we can support your business.
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