To cloud, or not to cloud?
This is the question posed by IT professionals as they ready their organizations for an agile future.
For Murat Yanar, director of Migration Workloads within the Worldwide Specialist Organization at Amazon Web Services (AWS), the answer is clear. “Innovation starts with cloud migration,” he says. “Helping our customers lift and shift their applications, data and infrastructure today opens up new opportunities for them to modernize tomorrow.”
Thanks to powerful hybrid solutions, cloud is no longer an all-or-nothing proposition. With AWS’s partnership with VMware, users can migrate their data and applications at their own pace while still leveraging on-premises architecture to create a single, flexible, secure IT infrastructure.
In fact, VMware Cloud on AWS™ is the only jointly engineered solution designed to simplify migrating and extending your VMware workloads into the AWS Cloud.
Here, Yanar highlights three crucial benefits of migrating to a hybrid environment with AWS and VMware—on-demand scale, robust IT security and instant innovation.
01
On-Demand Scale
Cloud capacity is essentially limitless. It’s also available in an instant. Additional servers can be added to cloud networks whenever extra computing power is needed (like handling unexpectedly high user traffic) and removed just as quickly. Data storage can be expanded or contracted on demand, too—the cloud is never full.
“Customers used to overprovision to ensure they had enough capacity to handle their business operations at peak levels,” Yanar says. “With AWS, they can provision the amount of resources they actually need, knowing they can instantly scale up or down along with the needs of their business.”
This elastic scale is essential for any organization that prioritizes speed and agility, especially since the alternative—opening and expanding regional data centers—can take three to five years to complete, Yanar notes.
When building regional data centers, Yanar says, “The CIO is faced with a number of decisions: Where is my stuff going to run, and how do I optimize that? If I build out a whole new data center, what are the costs associated with that? Do I leverage a colocation facility to support my growth in this area of business?”
For precisely this reason, AWS has an extensive global footprint to offer optimized performance through reduced latency. The cloud provider has 81 availability zones across 25 geographic regions worldwide, with more to come. And now, VMware Cloud is available on AWS Outposts, a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, services, APIs and tools to virtually any data center, colocation space or on-premises facility for a truly consistent hybrid experience.
With VMware Cloud on AWS, customers can leverage the massive scalability and global presence of the AWS Cloud to rapidly, seamlessly and cost-effectively meet their data center capacity or regional footprint expansion needs.”
Murat Yanar, Director, Migration Workloads, AWS
Robust IT Security
02
When businesses run their IT operations in the cloud, they benefit from the provider’s managed security measures, which are often more highly resourced than those of any single IT department.
“Our scale allows significantly more investment in security policing and countermeasures than almost any large company could afford themselves,” Yanar says.
In fact, all of AWS’s service offerings have been vetted and accepted as secure enough for top-secret workloads. VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud, for instance, is a secure platform used by government agencies to increase their agility and security.
“AWS’s core infrastructure is built to satisfy the security requirements for military, global banks and other high-sensitivity organizations,” Yanar says. “AWS uses the same secure hardware and software to build and operate each of our regions, so all of our customers benefit from the only commercial cloud that has had its service offerings and associated supply chain vetted and accepted as secure enough for top-secret workloads. This is backed by a deep set of cloud security tools, with more than 230 security, compliance, and governance services and key features.”
Security is still a shared responsibility between users and hosts, of course. “AWS manages and controls the components, from the host operating system and virtualization layer down to the physical security of the facilities in which the services operate,” adds Yanar. “Customers are responsible for building secure applications.”
Tech leaders can sleep easier knowing that unauthorized devices aren’t running on their networks, Yanar says. “A lot of CIOs worry about rogue servers sitting under a developer’s desk, running something destructive.”
With AWS, tech leaders have tools like AWS Config and resource tagging to see exactly what cloud assets their company is using at any moment. This means “no more hidden or anonymously placed servers in a rack, plugged into the corporate network,” Yanar says.
VMware Cloud on AWS customers saw a 76% reduction in unplanned downtime, which can often be the result of security breaches.
Source: IDC Business Value White Paper
