MAKING MULTI CLOUD WORK

MAKING MULTICLOUD WORK

RICHARD MUNRO, DIRECTOR, GLOBAL CLOUD STRATEGY, VMWARE, EXPLAINS WHY THE MULTICLOUD ERA IS HERE TO STAY.

Do you think this global pandemic has accelerated the adoption of the cloud among enterprises?

The lasting impact of Covid-19 is just an acceleration. In most cases, it’s things that everyone knew they needed to do, and we knew we needed to do for a long time.

But now, in the current situation, it’s been put to the top of the pile, because the pandemic and certain other factors all conspired to change the state of the market. Every organisation needs to adapt to that.

Everyone’s completely having to rethink everything they do about their business, from what their supply chains look like, to their various routes to market. Whatever you’re looking at in that world, these concepts of digitalisation, digital transformation, and anything you want to do, you immediately start looking to leverage your technology capability to provide more digital revenue streams or use digital to reduce cost. So they all automatically drive a desire for the cloud.

Now, at the same time, that’s actually only half the story. The drive to cloud is normally because people are thinking, “Oh, well, I just need to be a bit faster to get these things done, or I need to reduce my cost because I’m out of cash constraint, or I need to scale up these services that previously were small, but now everything’s being done online, so scale them up.’’ But there’s also another side, which is the applications. People want to do brand new things. How do you do it? Well, you build or buy applications. Those applications that are coming in need to be deployed, built, managed, and secured simultaneously as you have all your existing applications. So, we’ve got this world where we have multiple application stacks that we urgently need to be able to innovate with. Guess what? Modern application structures, particularly when you want to integrate them with existing things, drives multi-cloud as well. So multi-cloud and the modernisation of applications are both key business imperatives, but actually, they’re just two sides of the same coin. They both basically decide that we need a multicloud reality, and we need it urgently.

The latest stats suggest that the percentage of enterprises that have moved workloads to the cloud is still below 50 percent, significantly lower than the earlier projections. Has cloud computing really achieved mainstream adoption?

Stats are always interesting, but what is interesting is how you define the cloud. You genuinely can, very easily now, particularly with the announcements that we made at VMworld 2020. You cannot actually operate a genuine cloud service from

your own data centre, one that’s seamlessly integrated with cloud environments in AWS or Azure or one of our cloud providers. Sometimes people conflate these numbers, but I find it absolutely true that there is a very significant up-shift in people who want to rapidly move large portions of their workloads into the state of clouds. That’s because they need to do things with it.

When it comes to cloud migration, is lift-and-shift the best strategy or do you need to re-platform, and re-factor your workloads for better performance?

That is a great point. This speaks to this reality that we’ve come to find. If you think about the people’s applications, there’s just going to be a bunch that they don’t need to do anything with. They’re operating just fine, but maybe they want to improve resilience, security, or improve cost efficiency. Then actually, there are many people who want to take advantage of cloud-like capabilities, even though the application is absolutely fine. We have lot of customers who want to scale up for short periods. They want to use DR capabilities in the cloud, or scale down to provision new capacity; all those things that people want to be able to use cloud-scale for and at the same time, making their IT resources far more consumable.

A case in point is Abu Dhabi Digital Authority. They’ve a lot of security compliance, and they’re not going to rush headfirst into native rewrites. But they get a huge amount of benefit by automating their environment and creating a self-service catalogue for the public, which is essentially cloud characteristics. For that, lift and shift is absolutely fine.

The biggest shift actually is hybrid apps. In hybrid apps, let’s just think of a really simple example. Let’s say, I’ve got a database of my customers, and I’ve got some applications that hover around that database. And I MODERN APPLICATION STRUCTURES, PARTICULARLY WHEN YOU WANT TO INTEGRATE THEM WITH EXISTING THINGS, DRIVES MULTI-CLOUD AS WELL. SO MULTICLOUD AND THE MODERNISATION OF APPLICATIONS ARE BOTH KEY BUSINESS IMPERATIVES, BUT ACTUALLY, THEY’RE JUST TWO SIDES OF THE SAME COIN.

really want to leverage a new artificial intelligence service that’s running only in Azure.

My problem statement is, do I rewrite all of that to get it into Azure, just so that I can use the artificial intelligence? That will take years and is risky. Or, shall I recreate that environment, lift and shift inside the Azure data centres with native integration, and just run the IO service over it. I can do that in a week. So that’s the reality of where these things are coming up.

It might be easy to move workloads to the cloud, but many CIOs are finding it difficult to migrate back. How are you helping companies to move workloads back to the enterprise?

That is what we refer to as a hybrid cloud, which is the core of the VMware cloud foundation. It’s available in your data centre, and in edge locations as a service. It’s available in AWS, Azure,

Google, Oracle, Alibaba, and in IBM. You can seamlessly move workloads back and forth as you need. There’s absolutely literally no downtime, no changes. So that solves that huge dynamic where people are concerned about repatriation from the start. Now what about the modern workloads, which operate slightly differently? Firstly, most workloads are moving – this is where Kubernetes is actually so important because it effectively is a standard that can be deployed on multi-cloud environments.

Is Kubernetes now the de-facto platform for managing multi-cloud environments now?

It’s the default platform for how we build multi-cloud native applications. I didn’t decide that, VMware didn’t decide that, everyone decided that. That’s why it’s become the de-facto platform. The issue it had is that it was complex as it was built for applications developers. What we’ve been able to do is integrate that with all the enterprise operations to make it simple to deploy consistent management across multiple-clouds. That’s what we’ve been delivering with Tanzu portfolio and yes, I think it’s done. I don’t think there’s any more debate. It has become the standard, and it’s where all the innovation is happening.