Broadcom’s acquisition of VMWare and subsequent price increases are an inflection point for many IT organizations. Even mature organizations with large VMware environments are facing substantial price increases.
Fortunately, organizations have choices to proceed. Our prior blog outlines several of them.
This blog provides the perspectives of two IT Executives and Strategic Advisors. Tom Papahronis’s comments can be found in the left column of each table from a Cloud-First perspective, while Mehran Basiratmand, PhD‘s thoughts can be found in the right columns from a Cloud-Smart perspective.
Without further ado, onto the debate!
Tom’s Cloud-First Perspective:
I would argue that many affected teams would better serve their organizations by migrating to native to Azure and cloud services. Further, it is time that we start changing our default thinking about cloud services in general. I see many clients still looking for justification to move to the cloud, but the real question is what is the justification for staying on-prem? While a look at an alternative virtualization platform is certainly an option, I often challenge Mehran if our customers need an on-prem/colocation virtualization environment at all.
Mehran’s Cloud-Smart Perspective:
While my esteemed colleague, Tom, articulates an argument to migrate to a cloud-native environment given the latest changes to VMWare, there are however instances where cloud migration in a near term is not on the cards. It is equally imperative to recognize these scenarios and to provide alternative strategies to maintain the current services with minimal disruption.
The inhibitors to migrating to cloud-based solutions are generally caused by organizational factors including contractual agreements, existing hardware investments, executive mindsets, or other pressing IT priorities. From a technical perspective, barriers include skillsets, technical debt, and timing. Below the IT execs weigh in, with Tom’s cloud-first philosophy in column 1 and Mehran’s Cloud-Smart points of view in column 2. When addressing the challenges of individual organizations, we’ve found these to be most consistent.
| Cloud-First Approach | Cloud-Smart Approach |
- Focus staff time and skills on initiatives that are strategically important to the organization, rather than servers, hardware, and networking, and other commoditized functions.
- Services instead of servers. Preconfigured SaaS or IaaS services can simply eliminate a lot of patching, firmware changes, OS builds, and other maintenance that requires downtime for many types of applications. - Scale up or down, no strings attached. Cloud services are modular with much less planning and assembly required. This shortens planning horizons and project risks significantly. -What would a greenfield look like? If you had to build your current environment from scratch today, what would you use? Would it be on-premises? Do you have specific use cases that will only work on-premises? |
- Meet highly specific legal, compliance, or other specific organizational requirements for systems hosting. Some organizations have business or security concerns that cannot be met by cloud services or facilities. - Support For Highly Customized Architectures. If applications require specific hardware, firmware, or networking protocols, these may not be able to be met by mainstream cloud services. - Support For Legacy Applications. Some applications may still require non-Ethernet or non-TCP/IP-based networking, custom operating systems, or hardware drivers. - High Computational Intensity Support. Applications that rely on extremely fast network, processor, or storage resources may not be economically feasible in the cloud. |
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| Cloud-First Approach | Cloud-Smart Approach |
- Use the cloud to reduce vendor risks by consolidating point solutions and unpredictable software licensing costs.
- Reduce colocation risk – Azure and other cloud services use Tier 1 data centers with state-of-the-art physical security and multiple redundancies. Is your data center that well protected? - High availability and failover are checkboxes, not complex configurations that need to be maintained. - Reduce surprise financial risks – With some planning effort, everything is operational expense and has pricing known ahead of time. |
- Less Reliance On Public Internet Connectivity And Reliability. Public internet connectivity is required for many cloud-based services. There is inherently some risk in relying on this, and on-premises VMs or dedicated servers may reduce that specific risk. - Cloud Outages Do Happen. While they are typically short-lived, there is often little an individual customer can do to mitigate this risk. - Non-Compliance Risks. Organizationally, some compliance controls or other policy requirements may not be as easy to meet with infrastructure in the public cloud. |
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| Cloud-First Approach | Cloud-Smart Approach |
- Cost Predictability – Run rates and operational expenses can be planned in advance and much more easily tied to specific initiatives or teams.
- Facility, colocation, and hardware costs can be significantly reduced. - CapEx cycles & leases can be simplified. Less to manage, less to plan for, less unused capacity. - Pay only for what you need today. No more overbuilt environments or capacity hoarding. |
- Contractual Agreements with Data Center Providers. Organizations that have heavy on-premises footprints generally have negotiated multi-year contracts with data center providers. As such, “lifting and shifting” applications such as VMware to the cloud requires thoughtful planning to incrementally reduce their on-prem rack space; therefore, any hasty move would not necessarily yield financial benefits. - Capital Expenditure and Hardware Investment. Given server refresh cycles of most orgs, there is a possibility that an organization has recently refreshed their servers; therefore, abandoning their investment for the sake of migrating to a cloud solution without fully amortizing their servers or exhausting their capabilities would be splurge behavior. - Low Cost of Data Center Operations. There are organizations where the cost of data center maintenance, cooling and power are embedded in the general (non-IT) operating budget. In these circumstances, developing a justification for a full cloud migration is more challenging, since calculating the full cost of operating the current environment is an arduous task. Instead, the rationale for any cloud migration should be shifted to high-availability, reduction of DR cost and ease of provisioning based on consumption. |
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| Cloud-First Approach | Cloud-Smart Approach |
- Relieve the already overtaxed IT team with more automation and standardized services.
- Have that IT team focus on value-add projects rather than task to simply “keep the lights on.” Focus them on organizational goals, not just IT goals. - Build relevant and forward-looking skill sets. - Easily find qualified third parties for expertise and assistance when needed. - Reduce common service configurations to checking boxes and running scripts rather than complex product integrations. |
- Adoption of Cloud Culture. Each organization is in a different stage of their cloud journey. The process of adopting a new service/application in the cloud experiences a different vetting process. If the organizational culture is averse to cloud, it is imperative to continue hosting VMWare on-prem for a couple of years or until the cultural challenges stemming from cyber security concerns, perceived loss of control, skill-set deficiencies and cost management are appropriately addressed. Negotiating to maintain on-prem is a viable option while assessing the cloud offerings. - Technical Skillset. It takes time to develop or recruit individuals with the necessary skillset to fully support any cloud environment. In the case of organizations that have excellent resources to support their on-perm VMware environment, those skillsets do not necessarily translate to a quick migration and subsequent maintenance the cloud with the same degree of efficiencies. In these situations, it is prudent to maintain the current environment while gradually building the cloud skillset by deploying sandboxes and backup/recovery environments. |
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| Cloud-First Approach | Cloud-Smart Approach |
- Secure the environment at cloud scale. Cloud services can capture every event, every login, etc. easily and without physical on-premises disk and throughput limitations.
- Reduce or eliminate siloes between cloud and on-premises solutions. One place to monitor, one identity provider, one SIEM, and one set of governance controls. - Vendor security investments and product development efforts are heavily skewed to securing data and assets in the cloud. Take advantage of that. - Expanded security capabilities vs on-premises. Buying and running the same protection that M365 and Azure offer in an on-premises environment would cost orders of magnitude more than an existing cloud solution that you connect to. |
- Support Many Specific, Point-Based Security Solutions. If the organization requires using a portfolio of point-specific security solutions, it can be challenging to extend those to the cloud. Cloud services often lend themselves to using integrated security suites that are designed for cloud use. - Meet “Airgap” Requirements. If the organization truly has systems that do not (or cannot) be accessed using the public internet, then the cloud is not the answer. - Physical Security Requirements. Cloud providers have robust physical data security controls, but if the organization’s requirements exceed those, then an on-site or specialized colocation facility may be required. |
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| Cloud-First Approach | Cloud-Smart Approach |
- Reduce physical facilities overall and leverage cloud facility redundancies already in place.
- Unlimited backup capacity without physical infrastructure limitations. - Service, server, and application redundancies are easy to configure and test. - Increased (or decreased) RPO and RTO targets can be directly tied to operational expense. - Reduced DR complexity overall, and easy to build runbooks with automation. |
- Risk, security, and cost limitations outlined above will preclude using the cloud for disaster recovery.
- Specific Control Over Recovery Environment. Legacy systems, legacy hardware, proprietary connectivity, or even specific data residency requirements may not be able to be replicated by cloud services. |
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While two different perspectives of adopting cloud-native and maintaining on-prem environments for VMWare were outlined, an alternative is to adopt a best of breed approach of a hybrid environment. You can read through one of the hybrid options in a recent blog: Navigating the VMware License Increase: RETHINK IT & Consider Azure VMware Solution.
Migrating to a native cloud has significant benefits; however, it is a good practice to bounce your ideas off of those who are engaged in this process on a regular basis. It is always a sound idea to evaluate these options from your lens and to assess the pros and cons of each scenario based on the viewpoints presented.
It is a significant undertaking to move to the cloud. (Not unlike changing the tires on the truck as it speeds down the highway.) Recent market changes with VMware have changed this decision calculus quite a bit. Our team is ready to help chart the right course, or to just lend a sympathetic shoulder to cry on.
If you have any questions or are looking for assistance in choosing the right VMware Renewal option for your business, please reach out to info@eGroup-us.com or complete the form below.
For more information, view our recent webinar VMware Renewals: Evaluating Your Options for Making Informed Decisions.
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