Accelerating, Simplifying, and De-Risking Cloud Migrations with VMware Cloud. Practical Recommendations from VMware Experts

Businesses of all sizes, in all industry segments, are leveraging cloud computing. CIOs have been trying to increase the pace of adoption to keep up with business demands and respond to macroeconomic pressures. However, as the demand for cloud services has grown, CIOs have encountered challenges and unforeseen complexities when migrating and modernizing their existing applications and building new applications. These hurdles have stalled, delayed, or even caused cloud projects to fail, hindering businesses’ ability to harness the cloud’s power for other use cases, such as analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.

To help customers navigate their cloud adoption journey, three VMware employees, Sanjay Yadave – Vice President of Cloud APJ, and Andrew Richardson and Dominic Boldeman, both Senior Client Solutions Architects with VMware Professional Services, have produced a white paper: “Multi-Cloud Adoption Strategy, VMware Recommendations & Considerations.”

The authors have compiled a set of best practices and grounded experience working with multiple customers in regulated and non-regulated industries to help businesses de-risk, simplify, and accelerate cloud adoption in a multi-cloud world. The paper provides practical advice and offers actionable recommendations that businesses can implement to improve the velocity of their cloud initiatives.

The whitepaper outlines a typical customer journey to the public cloud, as defined by three key stages of cloud migration: Discovery, Planning, and Migration. There are a further twelve recommendations grouped into five key areas to help organizations accelerate migration from on-premises infrastructure to one or more public cloud platforms:

1. Understand the availability requirements of your applications: Organizations must identify and prioritize applications that require high availability and determine the most appropriate migration strategy for each application.
2. Respect application boundaries: Organizations must identify dependencies and interdependencies between applications to avoid breaking critical application boundaries during migration.
3. Minimize transformation during migration: Organizations must balance application modernization with migration velocity to meet short-term deadlines while achieving long-term success.
4. Develop treatment plans for supporting IT services and capabilities: Organizations must identify IT services and capabilities that require evolution or transformation to ensure success during migration.
5. Develop an operational model for multi-cloud: Organizations must develop an operating model that effectively manages and optimizes their multi-cloud environment.

The “Multi-Cloud Adoption Strategy, VMware Recommendations & Considerations” white paper is a must-read for businesses wanting to accelerate the use of public cloud at high velocity, scale, and low risk. The paper comprehensively analyzes the challenges and opportunities of transitioning from the data center to multiple public clouds and offers practical recommendations on how businesses can effectively manage their cloud resources.