Accelerating IT to the Speed of Business
Businesses today adapt to change with breathtaking speed. Lines of business now follow their products out the door digitally and continue tracking usage throughout the lifecycle. This gives companies valuable insights into how customers use and interact with their products, enabling them to analyze and evolve solutions while nurturing customer relationships. However, this puts significant pressure on IT organizations to develop applications that support this process and can evolve with ever-shifting requirements.
IT leaders are at a critical juncture. They must innovate faster to keep pace with business needs. But at the same time, need a way to address the explosive growth in the number and variety of applications required to support business goals.
What’s needed is a way to effectively support the complexity of legacy applications and environments while remaining agile enough to create new applications with distributed architectures that can run at the edge, the core, and in the cloud. Doing this—and managing these two distinctly different species of applications simultaneously—is no easy feat.
New applications often need to be written fast—seemingly overnight. Unlike in the past with monolithic applications, the new breed of cloud-native applications are assembled from microservices, snapped together with reusable, transportable, and scalable building blocks. But we can’t run our businesses on these new apps alone. We need both traditional and cloud-native applications. Therefore, these new applications need to complement our highly functional legacy application environments.
Unless the organization was born in the cloud, the best approach forward is to retain the VMware resources. For example, using Tanzu and other technologies allows you to do that and run your applications anywhere.
Cloud-native can provide the speed of change desired. Unlike a legacy application that might receive a new code load once or twice a year, a cloud-native application can change 10 times a week. Cloud-native apps are assembled, run, and modified simultaneously and constantly. Flexibility is essential, and application services like Tanzu provide that flexibility to shift to whatever “cloud” best serves the application and your business.
For global companies with multiple locations, the question of connectivity to the public cloud can be challenging. There’s no magic box. A lot of connectivity with support for many different cloud providers will be needed to be able to pick and choose the right services to support the environment.
Near-cloud resources such as Equinix that can host the hardware and provide the APIs and network connectivity to the public cloud have an essential role to play before migrating parts of the environment to the cloud. It’s important to remember that the public cloud is not the destination. The objective is to achieve a cloud operating model for the future data center capable of supporting one or multiple public cloud services.
