News

Multi-Cloud Complexities Spawn New 'VMware Cross-Cloud Services'

• By David Ramel
• 10/05/2021

VMware announced Cross-Cloud services, part of its strategy to help organizations get a handle on all of the complexities that come with multi-cloud implementations.

Backing up many other industry surveys and pundits, VMware asserted on the opening day of its VMworld 2021 event that multi-cloud is prominent in the IT industry and is growing, reporting that 75 percent of its own customers use two or more public clouds, with 40 percent using three or more. Virtualization & Cloud Review this summer reported on a HashiCorp State of Cloud Strategy Survey that revealed similar numbers: 76 percent of respondents were already using multi-cloud implementations, while 86 percent expected to do so within two years.

Multi-cloud implementations are fraught with complexity because of all the distributed moving parts in diverse environments that support the industry average of 500 business apps being used today.

"This complexity often forces trade-offs between moving fast and managing risk, resulting in slower execution while increasing costs," the company said in an Oct. 5 blog post. "VMware's strategy is built to help customers eliminate the tough choices and challenges by giving them a powerful combination of freedom and control in their multi-cloud business."

Thus the launch of VMware Cross-Cloud services, described as a group of integrated services meant to help organizations build, run and better secure apps across any cloud in order to deliver a faster and smarter path to the cloud for digital businesses.

Comprising the services are:

• A state-of-the-art platform for building and deploying cloud-native apps
• Cloud infrastructure for operating and running enterprise apps
• Cloud management for monitoring and managing the performance and cost of apps across different clouds
• Security and networking that spans across entire multi-cloud operations to connect and better secure all apps
• A digital workspace to empower the distributed workforce along with edge solutions to deploy and manage edge-native apps

Together, these services are designed to provide said digital businesses with three key advantages: an accelerated journey to the cloud, cost efficiency, flexibility and control across any cloud.

Tying into the new strategy are other new developments announced at VMworld 2021 this week, including:

• Cloud Infrastructure and Management: New multi-cloud innovations to help customers move to the cloud faster and more safely, accelerate app modernization, and adopt a cloud operating model.
• Apps: Advancements in the VMware Tanzu portfolio to provide developers with the autonomy to build and deploy apps on any cloud.
• Edge: VMware Edge, a product portfolio that will enable customers to run and manage edge-native apps across multiple clouds, anywhere.
• Security and Networking: New security innovations to deliver end-to-end zero trust architecture inside and across cloud and app environments.

"Multi-cloud is the digital business model for the next 20 years, as entire industries reinvent themselves," said VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram. "It's no longer about a 'cloud first' approach -- it's about being 'cloud smart'. Organizations should have the freedom to choose the 'right' cloud, based on their strategic business goals."