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Accelerating multi-cloud adoption is the need of the hour: CIOs on VMware TechData Virtual Roundtable

VMware TechData virtual roundtable brought together top CIOs from across the country to discuss strategies for accelerating multi-cloud infrastructure

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DQINDIA Online
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Multi-cloud

Hybrid cloud computing is now a reality across several established organizations, and is in the process of being gradually accepted by companies. Multiple studies state that hybrid, multi-cloud is rapidly becoming the norm with enterprises expected to increase cloud spending to about 95% in the coming twelve months. Approximately 50 percent of Indian companies are forecasted to operate in a hybrid multi-cloud environment by 2021.

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Various vertical markets are taking necessary initiatives to embrace the hybrid cloud journey. But now Indian enterprises must focus on identifying ways to accelerate the adoption of a multi-cloud infrastructure. Several CIOs from leading organizations congregated at the VMware - TechData virtual roundtable to do just that.

Industry leaders joined the VMware virtual roundtable from their respective locations to discuss and deliberate on the acceleration of hybrid cloud adoption. Anil Chopra, VP, research and consulting, CMR, kicked off the session with an overview on the impact of current circumstances on enterprise business objectives.

COVID-19 Spurs IT Demand in a Different Direction

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COVID 19 related lockdowns have driven the transition to remote working which relies on cloud for business continuity and easy scalability. A study by Forrester has also predicted a continued growth in demand for cloud infrastructure.

“Nevertheless, this would require more stringent Disaster Recovery plans to deal with data centre disruption or other application failures. Also, there is now a requirement to build greater resiliency to tackle any untoward incidents. Therefore a move to hybrid, multi-cloud is essential as it is more trusted, flexible, dynamic, reliable, secure, efficient and offers greater control. Of course, this doesn’t undermine the need to having an on-prem data centre infrastructure, which is virtualized. There is now a need to have the best of both worlds,” added Chopra.

Anil Chopra, VP, research and consulting, CMR

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“Once we emerge from the current situation, we expect to see an increase in cloud adoption. Enterprises are now more likely to use Virtual Machines, Containers, Kubernetes, and multi-cloud management processes. While there was already a positive move towards a hybrid, multi-cloud infrastructure, the current situation has actually accelerated that movement” concluded Chopra in his opening remarks to set the context for the discussion.

How Is VMware Helping Customers with Multi-cloud Strategies

All organizations today find themselves facing an unprecedented situation. The cloud strategy adopted now may drive how businesses become more agile while being secure and connected, shared Misha Joshi, Senior Director, Professional Services, VMware India.

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“As we all know, applications are driving multi-cloud strategies today. Application developers are expected to go to market sooner with features that customers can use immediately and the market is defined by the diversity of it. So, the developers are not just using VMs, but are also using containers. Also, from the organizations’ point of view, each IT organization has its own cloud management to do and there are multiple tools that they use,” said Joshi.

Misha Joshi

It’s not VMware’s stance to make the current times feel like it’s a business opportunity. VMware helps enterprises operate any cloud service from any provider, and ensure that any application is able to access it from anywhere. VMware has products and services to help enterprises scale up their hybrid or multi-cloud operations or even migrate between multiple clouds. VMware also helps organizations build on automation to scale on demand.

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Practical Considerations in the Multi-cloud Adoption Journey

Accelerating the cloud adoption journey has four considerations, says Sonal Jain, Consulting Architect, Professional Services, VMware India:

  1. Integration – Every cloud has to be integrated with the organization’s ecosystem,
  2. Resiliency – During a crisis, it is important that the cloud is resilient,
  3. Scale – The infrastructure should be able to scale as per the demand, and
  4. Automation –end-to-end automation helps meet IT goals. VMware has provided integrations in terms of - ITSM tools, backup and restore, and security & vulnerability – to several organizations.
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Sonal also presented use cases where VMware successfully designed a solution for 20,000 active workloads, onboarded 14 business verticals with various projects in each vertical, and helped 7000 active workloads function in multi-cloud. Jain shared information on projects with respect to VMware validated design framework and automation as well.

The Virtual Roundtable

CK Prasad, Regional GM, Southern Region, RailTel Corporation of India Ltd joined the virtual roundtable to share his organization’s experience of working with VMware while building and deploying RailCloud. “We had a virtualized environment before we deployed RailCloud, which was a community cloud spanning across two data centres. The emphasis was on how to accelerate delivery for customers and security, which was also the trigger to move to the cloud,” said Prasad.

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“Cloud adoption helped us accelerate and deepen our participation in our customer’s digital transformation journeys. VMware and RailTel’s collaborative approach during deployment helped in faster adoption of RailCloud. The team has delivered excellent work that match our exacting specifications,“ said Prasad.

The virtual roundtable centered on the strategic IT initiatives that enterprises were focusing on once they emerged from the current situation, and challenges with respect to IT infrastructure during the lockdown phase.

“We have had to transition to a digital-first mode of working within a very short span of time. Of course, at ABB we are well equipped with digital platforms and services through which we can engage with our customers like before. However, the key role played by these platforms today is to make customers believe in them. Now they are quite impressed with the digital way of doing things,” said Lohith HC, New Initiative Lead India, ABB Ability Innovation Center.

Lohith HC New Initiative Lead India ABB Ability Innovation Center

In the current situation, Cloud adoption is a key component of the Business Continuity Process . Martin Peter, Senior Manager - Professional Services Sales at VMware, talked about the importance of advanced automation and the concept of doing more with less. He also invited opinions of industry leaders on identifying the candidates for cloud initiatives.

In conclusion, Joshi stated that a key learning is that a good plan, design and architecture can go a long way. “Automate as much as you can so that you can do more with less, and reduce errors. Business Continuity Planning should not be a reaction for us but a planned activity,” concluded Joshi bringing the informative and insightful session to an end.

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