The IT stack that supports business applications continues to evolve. Seventy-three percent of enterprises currently use two or more public clouds.1 Despite the benefits of successful multi-cloud strategies—most notably, delivering transformational apps and services to customers and employees faster—managing applications and workloads across heterogenous environments presents its own set of unique challenges.
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Operational Consistency Tops the List of Concerns
Today, public clouds exist as vertically integrated silos with little support for seamless interoperability between different public cloud environments. VMware’s latest research with enterprise IT executives underscores this challenge. Nearly half (46%) of technology executives report that their cloud infrastructure is increasingly complicated, largely due to the need for a variety of cloud services, greater use of containers, and regional data compliance.1
91% of enterprise executives are looking to improve “consistency across their public cloud environments.”
And what executives are looking to improve the most is “consistency across [their] public cloud environments.”2 Without it, organizations are likely to experience blind spots in monitoring, disparities in best practices, and higher levels of security and financial risk.
The Thing About Multi-Cloud and DevOps
At the same time, enterprises must accelerate their app modernization journeys. Developers are a scarce asset—enabling them to be productive with a consistent Dev experience and DevSecOps tool chain is as critical as consistent Day 2 operations and governance. Yet, as developers access the APIs, interfaces, and best services of every hyperscale cloud to build great software, they’re slowed down by disparate infrastructure and multi-cloud complexity. Without a rethink of how enterprise IT platforms are architected for multi-cloud and modern apps, companies risk losing precious time, money, and resources in their race to the top.
Architecting for a Modern, Multi-Cloud World
Just like VMs and containers, successfully architecting for multi-cloud and DevOps involves a layer of abstraction that spans all cloud infrastructure and provides a set of horizontal, pre-paved capabilities that unify app development and operations across clouds—without hindering access to the unique and innovative portfolio of cloud services delivered by each cloud provider.
In this cross-cloud operating model, developers no longer have to think about underlying infrastructure when they write code. Operators can deploy, manage, and monitor apps and container infrastructure in the same way for every cloud. And, from a business standpoint, organizations can spend less time consumed with multi-cloud management and more time developing the next great idea, transforming the customer experience across channels, or scaling departmental efficiencies.
Where to Start
In the multi-cloud era, it’s important to embrace cloud on your terms. The VMware Cross-Cloud services portfolio helps customers do just that with an industry-first multi-cloud architecture that unifies app and cloud infrastructure, development, and operations across all of their cloud, on-prem, and edge environments. To learn more, stream our latest Multi-Cloud Briefing for a comprehensive look at how to accelerate your multi-cloud strategy in the face of rapidly evolving business requirements or visit www.vmware.com/go/cross-cloud.
[1] VMware FY22 H2 Benchmark: Digital Momentum, August 2021
[2] VMware FY22 Q4 Executive Pulse, January 2022
