A specially-convened CBR Dining Club event which took place in early February at the Dorchester Hotel, London, Lucas Wager, UKI Cloud Platform VMware Leader at IBM, talked about complementary benefits of virtualisation and cloud computing.
IS CLOUD APPROPRIATE FOR MY BUSINESS?
In his words, and in his experience, he highlighted that 80% of business critical workloads remain on premise, not in the cloud. Reasons are mainly two. The first is “compliance“: because of regulatory increase like GDPR, FSA and other industry based, this prevents customer to move to the cloud some critical aplications and data. The second reason is about performances: they don’t feel the cloud performing as well as their on-premises infrastructures.
The key to persuade them to move to the cloud is the reliability and availability of more than one datacenter, interconnected with very low latencies. This means not only availability but also scalability, and performances are proven throught statistics exported publicly. Comparison with clients’ premises makes the work itself.
EXTENSION OR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
Usually lift and shift (aka “extension”) isn’t the best choice on its own. Most of the time it comes with a digital transformation. And usually lift and shift is the premise to drive to a complete and final digital transformation and consolidation.
The first method is simple, it’s just a matter of relocation of workload from premises to the cloud that makes the client less nervous, also because he knows that in any case, in any time, in any condition he can just take back that workload to his premises with no modifications.
At a later stage, when he becomes confident, the consolidation is a natural evolution of what seemed complex and risky before. So, nomore an extension, but a digital transformation in its literal meaning.
AMERICAN AIRLINES
The first challenge that AA had was not being able to serve its clients quickly enough because its existing infrastructure was going end-of-life. So the plan was moving progressively the workload, but not using the extension method: since part of the workload was staying on premises, the part that moved to the cloud was a consolidation of the current processes in a hybrid cloud configuration, so AA could keep its existing investments. Having VMware on premises, and a wide number of Cloud Providers using the same technology, it was relatively simple to realize a hybrid approach.
Complete interview here
