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Majority of VMware Shops Choose AWS for Future Cloud Migration
A new study shows that AWS is the cloud platform of choice, nearly 2-to-1, over Microsoft Azure.
VMware supports both the Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure public clouds, but it has a longer and more integrated offering with AWS. That relationship is poised to pay big dividends, according to a new study.
The study reports that the vast majority of businesses running VMware environments are planning to move at least part of their environments to the cloud by next year, with AWS being the platform of choice for nearly half of them.
Druva, a provider of data protection solutions for the cloud. polled 443 VMware professionals this summer for its "2017 VMware Cloud Migration Survey" and found that 90 percent of them expect to have VMware environments running in the cloud at some point in 2018.
Nearly half (48 percent) of those surveyed identified AWS as their preferred platform for the move. The second-most popular cloud platform was Microsoft Azure, cited by around 25 percent of respondents.
The widespread move to the cloud seems spurred by VMware's evolving partnership with AWS, according to Druva. Last October, the two companies announced an initiative to deliver VMware solutions on the AWS cloud as part of an offering called "VMware Cloud on AWS."
There have also been reports that the two are undertaking a separate project that would let enterprises run AWS on their private datacenters, which, if true, would pit AWS and VMware directly against Microsoft and its anticipated Azure Stack offering.
"Since October of 2016, when VMware announced its partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), organizations have been looking to the cloud
to provide consistent functionality while enabling cloud workload mobility with products like
vMotion so that application resources can reside where they make the most sense for the business," the report stated. "Organizations want to utilize the advantages of the cloud while also utilizing the skill sets of their current VMware administrators. When you consider the impact that downtime and poor application performance have on user productivity, coupled with rising cost associated with infrastructure demands, you can clearly see why the cloud represents an appealing option for managing VMware environment workloads."
The appeal of the cloud notwithstanding, most organizations will likely keep some of their workloads on-premises; over three-quarters (78 percent) of survey respondents said they plan to take a hybrid approach.
Among the survey's other findings:
- Of those who have already begun their cloud migrations, disaster recovery applications were the most represented, at 31 percent.
- Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed (63 percent) said they are considering re-architecting their applications for the cloud. "As a result of the ever-increasing number and complexity of data centers that are expanding to meet the needs of the business applications running on them, there is a growing desire to build applications using many of the cloud service products to augment the VMware environments on public cloud platforms," the report said.
- Cost was cited by just over a third (38 percent) of respondents as a big reason for migrating workloads to the cloud. "For a significant portion of the survey respondents, cost was not the main driver behind their decision," Druva noted. "Our survey shows that such migrations are the result of a strong business need."
Druva's full report (registration required) is available here.