IT leaders need to prioritize and accelerate cloud adoption on an urgent basis: Misha Joshi, VMware India

With the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic compelling organizations in India to adopt new measures to ensure business continuity, the current hybrid cloud scenario in the country is all set to change. In an interview with DataQuest, Misha Joshi, senior director, Professional Services, VMware India talks about how the COVID-19 crisis has affected organisations, the role played by cloud in the present time, and how VMware is helping companies with BCP.

DQ: How has the COVID-19 outbreak affected industries that are dependent on on-prem hardware infrastructure?

Misha: The ongoing situation has necessitated a significant change in the way organizations and industries function. Organizations with on-premise data centres are facing challenges in adapting to the situation as scalability and easy access to applications are of critical importance. Never before have organizations had to plan for such scale and agility.

IT leaders need to prioritize and accelerate their cloud adoption on an urgent basis – both for enabling their workforce to work remotely as well as for ensuring secure, seamless connectivity for their customers. With an elastic infrastructure, IT can scale in order to meet changing remote work demands. Cloud adoption and overall digital transformation are no longer optional, they are business-critical investments, necessary for business continuity even in times of disruption.

The sudden rise in demand for remote working has led many enterprises from various industries to explore new ways to adapt and innovate.

What are the challenges being faced by organizations that are transitioning to the cloud at present?

We have observed multiple challenges seen by our customers in these times, including re-purposing IT budgets, ensuring business continuity, quick migration of workloads, skillsets for managing the cloud and retaining employee and end customer confidence while continuing to be future-fit.

As organizations work to accelerate their digital transformation journeys it is crucial for them to identify the best way to digitize without disrupting their on-going business or affecting critical systems including customer data. Security is another important factor to keep in mind as the transition process should not leave any loopholes in the enterprise’s security fabric. Any technology decision made now must consider customers first, and further align the IT business needs with a modern and dynamic business environment. A streamlined data strategy is also essential to make a successful transition.

DQ: How is VMware rising up to the challenge as more and more industries transition to cloud?

Misha: As organizations gear up to meet the current challenges head-on, the cloud strategies adopted now may decide how businesses become more agile in the future while ensuring security and scalability. VMware aims to enable a digital foundation that delivers any app on any cloud to any device with intrinsic security architected into every layer.

VMware offers Horizon 7 and Horizon Cloud, which can help IT teams quickly provision virtual desktops and applications across on-premises, hybrid and multi-cloud environments to enable the remote workforce to securely access Windows resources from anywhere. Our solutions can also enable Horizon cloud in partnership with providers like Microsoft Azure, VMware Cloud on AWS and other cloud providers. Our field teams can guide companies looking to scale physical or cloud capacity to meet their growing demands in current times.

VMware also offers VeloCloud, which enables remote connectivity, bandwidth on priority. Companies can also accelerate their business application performance through VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud for both branch and at home users, delivering simple, reliable, better secured, and optimized access to traditional and cloud applications.

VMware’s Carbon Black ensures complete protection from the data center to individual endpoints and devices and protects remote workforces from cyberattacks without any extra infrastructure. It also offers threat intelligence that delivers research, solutions, and strategies to minimize impact, decrease attacker swell time, inhibit lateral movement and suppress intrusions. Carbon Black is tightly integrated with our BCP solution in the form of Workspace One Intelligence.

VMware is committed to providing our customers safe and seamless secure access to their work infrastructure and data. As leaders in the space of digital transformation, we are equipped to help our customers continue business as usual while providing continuous, secure access to applications across endpoints.

DQ: Future of work is the new Tech Jargon. What according to you will become the norm even after the COVID-19 lockdown is lifted?

Misha: The future of work is already changing. Companies are actively looking at improvising their digital transformation strategies and how teams collaborate and serve customers. As distributed working starts becoming mainstream and work itself becomes more dispersed, infrastructure and technology solutions will continue to be optimized for the workplace of the future. Our business is predicated on building the infrastructure and solutions optimized for the workplace of the future.

As our CEO, Mr. Pat Gelsinger said, right now, when business as usual is not an option, we are focussed on helping each other, and assisting our customers as they respond and adapt. VMware has the capabilities to help customers to maintain productivity and connectivity in a secure environment as their employees work from home. As a company, we will continue to build infrastructure and technology solutions that support the workplaces of the future.

DQ: What edge does VMware have in terms of helping customers with business continuity planning under the current circumstances?

Misha: We have in place a Business Continuity plan that has been designed to help our customers rapidly digitally transform their infrastructure to allow remote working without losing out on productivity, efficiency or security.

As solution providers, our focus is on helping the community and our customers as they respond and adapt currently:

• We deliver digital workspaces that can access critical applications to any endpoint.
• We can protect all endpoints that are accessing organization assets remotely.

With VMware Carbon Black can help protect remote workers against cyberattacks without any additional infrastructure.

• We can accelerate the performance of organizational assets that are now remote (using VMware SD-WAN)
• And we can provide the elastic capacity to scale new virtual desktop users instantly and on-demand on cloud infra with our partnership with leading cloud service providers Microsoft and AWS

Horizon on Microsoft Azure enables users to consume Azure cloud and WVD offerings of Microsoft through the Horizon Control Pane and can be delivered instantly

• VMware Cloud on AWS allows customers to leverage VMware-based elastic capacity in the cloud in under 2 hours
• We have the capabilities to help our customers accelerate their journey in migration to the cloud, enable automation of Day1 and Day2 services on VMware platforms on-prem or on the cloud, or enable remote working quickly and at scale through VMware Professional Services.

We are committed to helping our customers stay safe and continue their business with seamless secure access to their work infrastructure and data.