The Role of Platform Teams in Accelerating Modernization and Multi-Cloud Journeys

Organizations have seen tremendous digital transformation for several years now, but especially in the past year, we have seen many accelerate that digital journey. From navigating the new world of remote-first work to deploying modern apps in record time while strengthening cybersecurity, cloud adoption has made businesses become more agile and resilient.

Multi-cloud is no longer just a buzzword – it’s here to stay and growing at a rapid pace. More enterprises are delivering code across private and public clouds and increasingly using Kubernetes to scale apps. In fact, IDC predicts that in 2022, 90 percent of enterprises around the world will rely on a mix of multi-cloud and legacy platforms, and the recent VMware State of Kubernetes 2022 report found that nearly half of the organizations surveyed are utilizing Kubernetes in multiple public clouds. 

However, managing apps and infrastructure in a multi-cloud environment comes with added complexity – teams have to control costs, ensure performance, and manage consistent security policies across these diverse and distributed environments. By implementing platform teams, organizations can drive modernization and accelerate their multi-cloud journey while balancing moving fast and managing risk.

How Platform Teams Can Support Modern Application Platforms

To help with multi-cloud complexity and streamline software delivery, organizations need an application platform. For that, they need platform engineering teams. Platform teams provide consistent, end-to-end management and enable business leaders, security personnel, and other members of the organization to communicate business needs and meet business challenges. A team of experts focused on running your platform as a product is essential for delivering world-class developer experiences and delivering applications to production quickly and securely.

Platform teams are integral to a DevSecOps practice by not only building and running the platform developers use to create new applications that drive business revenue, but also acting as a communication link between your dev team, IT operations team, and security team. By having a team of experts devoted to running your platform as a product, organizations can improve the developer experience and get applications to production quickly and securely. Tools such as VMware’s Tanzu portfolio can elevate app development and the DevSecOps experience for platform teams, while VMware’s Cloud Management solutions can enable infrastructure teams to embrace infrastructure as code and empower lines of business to optimize resources across clouds.

How to Cultivate a Successful Platform Team

When done well, platform teams provide exponential value for software development organizations. By using a modern application platform team, developers and stakeholders can experiment and solve business-critical problems faster, in more innovative ways, without sacrificing reliability. This, in turn, creates immediate value for your business.

If you want to hire the best people for your platform team, make sure they have the right combination of business, technical, and people skills. To be successful, team members must possess a data-driven mindset, a willingness to learn, and an ability to adjust to change. Platform teams that are confident and capable of adapting to change are better equipped to succeed as more application teams migrate to their platform.

Above all, platform teams should have excellent communication skills. Fostering a culture of open communication is necessary to ensure that developers, IT ops, and business units such as human resources, marketing, and finance understand the platform and can help to champion it. Platform teams must demonstrate how their platform adds value to stakeholders in order to justify platform changes, funding, and staffing

At the end of the day, business capabilities and outcomes are not solely tied to technology or tools used. It is important for employees in an organization to focus as much as possible on creating value for the organization. As a result, attention needs to be paid to the individuals supporting this toolset. The ultimate application platform is supported by platform teams that help elevate the developer experience and makes app deployments frictionless.

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