How Cloud Migration Affects Networking, Security, and Storage – Cloud Blog – VMware

Cloud migration is a top priority. So, how can you make sure you gain the benefits of the public cloud while reducing cost and risk? This brings us to the importance of infrastructure consistency, and how cloud migration affects the networking, security, and storage of the workloads you’re migrating.

By migrating your apps onto infrastructure in the cloud that’s consistent with where your applications run today, you can speed up time to value and mitigate the risks associated with infrastructure changes. This is particularly important to consider for your business critical, and otherwise complex applications that would require significant refactoring to run in the public cloud.

When you move to a new set of infrastructure services in the public cloud, you lose your existing networking, security, and storage configurations, leading to a slower and less efficient migration. Ultimately, having the same underlying infrastructure layer for your applications between on-premises and the public cloud gives you the fastest, lowest risk, and most cost-effective migration path.

With consistent infrastructure, you can define networking, security, and storage policies once, and keep them the same as you move your applications between environments, from your private cloud, to public clouds, or edge locations. These policies are tied to the workload, so you can move them to any location, any number of times without losing this consistency.

In this post, we’ll outline the benefits of maintaining these policies and configurations while migrating your apps, and how this can accelerate the pace of migration. But first, let’s start with the challenges.

The Challenges of Migrating Applications to New Infrastructure Services

Choosing to migrate your apps onto completely different set of infrastructure services, such as between your data center and the public cloud, can lead to a few complications. Not only is it expensive and time consuming to refactor for a native cloud environment, but in the process of refactoring your applications, the configurations that you’ve spent years building for networking, security, and storage will need to be rebuilt as well — leading to a much more expensive, risky, and less agile migration.

Networking

When refactoring for the public cloud, elements of networking are purchased and maintained separately, with changes required to your routing, DNS, and IP addresses. Using multiple public cloud providers increases this complexity, involving different tooling per cloud. Much of the time and investment you’ve put into your existing network isn’t carried forward during and after your migration.

Security

Security comes with its own individual challenges. In the process of refactoring, the security configurations you’ve established are often significantly altered or lost. In the public cloud, you will have to purchase security products, rebuild firewall rules and re-establish your ability to demonstrate regulatory compliance with these new tools and infrastructure.

Storage

Last, as you refactor your applications, you may lose existing storage policies for availability, performance, and access, requiring you to rebuild them in the public cloud.

The Benefits of Migrating Your Apps with Consistent Infrastructure

The challenges we just outlined grow with your volume of applications. Your teams may be ready to refactor some of your app portfolio for the public cloud, but for business-critical apps that are costly and time-consuming to migrate, you don’t need to lose your networking, security, and storage configurations just to get to the cloud.

When you keep your infrastructure layer consistent between the data center and public cloud, you can avoid these complications altogether. You’re able to maximize the investment that you’ve already made in your applications and ensure a cost-effective, fast, and low-risk migration to the cloud. Not only that, but keeping your infrastructure consistent also allows the flexibility to seamlessly migrate to any cloud provider, giving you agility in changing times.

For your applications running on vSphere in your datacenter or private cloud, migrating to a VMware Cloud environment in a hyperscale cloud provider like AWS, Azure, GCP and more gives you the same infrastructure layer as you had on-premises, with the benefit of cloud agility, scalability, and native services. VMware Cloud is an infrastructure service itself, combining vSphere, NSX, vSAN, and vRealize Cloud Management, a familiar stack if you’re running an SDDC with VMware today.

Let’s review how the consistent infrastructure provided by VMware Cloud impacts the networking, security, and storage configurations of your applications as you migrate them to the cloud.

Networking

With NSX, you can seamlessly extend your network from on-premises to the cloud with full visibility, enterprise-grade L2 and L3 networking functionality, and microsegmentation. Your applications keep their networking policies, so you don’t have to rewrite them for the public cloud or purchase new components.

Security

Keeping your infrastructure layer consistent lets you maintain the security you’ve already established in your applications, and the compliance VMware maintains for its software, removing a massive hurdle for running your apps in the cloud. As an additional benefit of microsegmentation in NSX, you can also monitor and protect east-west traffic in the public cloud.

Storage

With vSAN, you maintain your policy-driven storage by using existing tools for predictable performance, efficiency, and scalability. There’s no need to convert VM storage to native cloud storage. You also have immediate access to cloud-based disaster recovery, pre-integrated with VMware Cloud.

Ultimately, migrating apps with consistent infrastructure enables you to maintain your current networking, security, and storage configurations during your move to cloud, so you can have a cost-effective, agile, and low-risk migration which is essential for business-critical applications that need to stay resilient. You can migrate workloads seamlessly between environments, maintain existing policies from your data center, and gain efficiency with hybrid and multi-cloud operations through the use of consistent infrastructure platforms like VMware Cloud.

Interested in learning more about the advantage of consistent infrastructure for your workloads? Head over to VMware Cloud Workload Migration Tools.

Check out these additional resources to learn more:

VMware HCX Datasheet

Migration Solution Overview