Tackling Cloud Complexity with Standardization at VMware Explore

Chris Drieberg

September 01, 2022

Cloud complexity is an inevitability. Regardless of where an organization may be on their cloud journey – on-prem, in the public cloud, or managing an expanding hybrid cloud – the reality is managing the enterprise isn’t getting any easier. Demand continues to rise for greater access to more data across the organization to do things like run analytics and machine learning and to automate more processes. The situation places increasing pressure on CIOs and administrators, who are already stressed to provide high-performing, scalable networks that are resilient, agile, and easily optimized.

This new world is not for the faint of heart, as my colleague, Sara Lent wrote in July.

Thankfully companies like Hitachi Vantara and VMware are working tirelessly to innovate in this area to not only provide real-world solutions to many of the complexity challenges, but to listen and partner with customers as they navigate the journey.

Together with VMware we have worked to establish a cloud-smart framework for customers that comprises infrastructure, solutions, and partnership. And according to the organizations I’ve met with this week on the floor of VMware Explore, that’s exactly what they’re looking for. In addition, they want more standardization around the approach to managing their expanding clouds – an approach based on methodology and technical expertise, not only technology – that makes building best-of-breed solutions easier.

Our cloud-smart framework is designed to do just that: help organizations develop an outcomes-based approach that makes it easy to consume and scale the cloud solutions. As a result, and with the help of our engineered solutions, organizations can grow their environments organically and efficiently.

But to do it right, involves commitment by all partners to help the organization reach its goals. And to do that, it means collaborating early and often with each party. We’ve had highly successful early engagements with partners like VMware, Cisco, and Veritas that have led to our customers reaching their goals well ahead of schedule. And we’re continually adding great partner-led solutions to our portfolio, as well. For example, we now offer volume-based VMware Cloud on AWS, and VMware Cloud on Azure licensing as part of our portfolio. As a result, we can now start from the data center and help customers go out to the cloud or start from the cloud and grow them back into the data center.

The bottom line is that in this era of increasing complexity, standardization will go a long way toward the success of cloud implementation and management. The approach needs to be flexible and thoughtful, and bring in the best, most nimble partners available to ensure swift development, rollout, and management.

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