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The Journey to Your Cloud

Cloud computing is the antidote to inflexible, overly complex IT infrastructures. It’s not an end state you can jump to instantaneously, but a transition achieved in stages. To guide and assist you on your path, VMware provides The VMware
Journey, a proven and practical implementation roadmap designed to deliver benefits as you go.

During each phase, IT becomes more agile, responsive, and efficient; ROI increases while IT costs go down. The journey culminates in a cloud that is uniquely yours—a private, public, or hybrid cloud environment perfectly aligned with your individual business needs and goals.

Why Make the Journey? What’s In It for Our Company?

Agile and responsive IT is critical for business success in our global, highly networked economy. But traditional IT platforms aren’t equal to the challenge. In fact, with their inherent rigidity and multiple layers of complexity, they could fairly be described as the antithesis of agility.

The Cloud: Tailored for Today’s and Tomorrow’s Needs

The evolution to this new model begins with virtualization, the fundamental enabling technology of cloud computing. VMware research reveals that enterprises typically approach the Journey in one of these two ways:

•Path 1. Step-Wise Virtualization to Maximize Efficiency. IT steadily virtualizes more and more of its workloads and environments, dramatically improving datacenter efficiency, increasing reliability and quality of service, and simplifying operations.

•Path 2. Progression Toward Cloud-Scale Operations and Agility. Once 20-25% virtualization has been achieved, IT begins to deploy cloud computing capabilities as well. This approach amplifies the benefits of virtualization, driving business agility, reducing IT spend, and preserving IT governance. Significantly, customers that take this approach—earlier adoption of cloud architecture—report lowering their costs and boosting agility six times faster than enterprises that wait.
This second path is more ambitious in scope and entails greater organizational change, modifications to business processes and workflows, and training cycles for IT and line-of-business staff. While this approach can yield greater value in a shorter timeframe, its suitability depends on the size of your enterprise and the depth of your training resources.

Whichever path you opt for, the VMware Journey supports your initiative with a three-phase framework of best practices:

Phase 1: IT Production
In the first phase of the Journey, IT virtualizes production workloads as well as development, testing and staging environments, consolidating servers to increase utilization and reduce costs. Storage, computing, and network resources are pooled into streamlined and flexible “virtual compute clusters” to deliver further efficiency gains.

Higher Efficiency and Lower Costs
The primary focus of this phase is enhancing infrastructure efficiency. The initiative to virtualize IT Production workloads generally comes from within the IT organization, driven by a desire to reduce the cost of hardware, power, cooling, and physical space. VMware virtualization is applied to IT-owned workloads with relatively uncomplicated governance models such as file, print, DNS servers, internet load-balancing services and simple applications with small-footprint databases instances.

Early Cloud Adoption to Drive Greater Value
Even in this initial phase, the enterprise can supplement datacenter resources by moving selected workloads, such as test and development and pre-production QA, to one of the many compatible and secure public clouds offered worldwide by VMware vCloud™ partners.

In fact, recent VMware research shows that customers who implement cloud capabilities sooner—during this first phase of the Journey—significantly amplify efficiency gains, lower their costs, and improve IT agility and business responsiveness. Early adoption also gives the enterprise hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure operations, enabling IT to reliably plan for more widespread cloud deployments later on.

The first phase of the Journey provides these tangible and measurable benefits:

•Higher utilization of existing resources
•Reduced IT complexity
•Greater efficiency and flexibility through resource pooling and elastic capacity
•Improved application performance and scalability
•Delay or avoidance of major capital investments
•Significant savings in operational and maintenance costs

Phase 2: Business Production
In this phase, the cloud computing initiative expands beyond IT assets to the company’s business-critical applications with the support of application owners. Advanced VMware cloud computing capabilities drive performance, security, and service levels to previously unattainable heights.

Delivering Higher Quality of Service for Business-Critical Applications
The emphasis in Phase 2 is improving application availability and SLAs to the business. At this juncture, cloud computing sponsorship shifts to the owners of business applications. Having taken notice of the Phase 1 benefits achieved for IT-specific applications, these owners begin to request the same improvements for their production application services. With the support of these stakeholders, IT begins virtualizing the company’s business-critical, multi-tier applications such as supply chain, finance, human resources and other commercial packaged applications. The enterprise may opt to shift some of these workloads to VMware vCloud-enabled public cloud services, initiating a strategic move to hybrid cloud architecture.

At the same time, the private cloud infrastructure is enriched and augmented with solutions for performance optimization, high availability, and disaster recovery. An automation plan is implemented to manage application delivery based upon defined business rules, policies, and agreed service-level requirements.

As a direct result of Phase 2 innovations, the enterprise achieves:

•Significantly improved application performance and availability
•Reduced maintenance downtime
•Further gains in efficiency and reductions in operational expenses
•On-demand, automated allocation of IT resources when and where needed
•Better-than-physical security for infrastructure, applications, and data alike

Phase 3: IT as a Service
During this final phase of the Journey, the organization approaches the desired end-state of an enterprise hybrid cloud, in which IT provides the highest business value at the lowest possible cost: IT as a service (ITaaS). With a highly automated, low-maintenance cloud infrastructure in place, IT can focus on delivering innovations that drive revenue growth, enhance the customer experience, and minimize business and compliance risk.

Enabling Business Agility: IT Fulfills Its Strategic Role
Ideally at this stage every IT service is fully defined in terms of its components, resources, and delivery guarantees. Business units can select and obtain resources through a standardized and automated self-service catalog or on-demand. This reduces provisioning time to a fraction of what it once was. Lines of business are expensed for IT services via transparent chargeback and detailed reporting.

With advanced management tools in place from the desktop to the datacenter, IT achieves unprecedented gains in performance, availability, scalability, and responsiveness—all while maintaining full control, airtight security, and compliance.

Download a joint whitepaper from VMware and CIO.com, Boldly Navigating Towards IT-as-a-Service and learn how innovative CIO’s are forging ahead through the virtualization journey towards an IT-as-a-Service model. (Registration required)
On the infrastructure level, the private and public domains of the enterprise hybrid cloud interoperate seamlessly: applications are automatically and dynamically shifted between internal and external infrastructure to cost-effectively accommodate fluctuating user demand. Each workload runs in the environment best suited to its business purpose, boosting agility without diminishing security, reliability, or governance.

With its attention, assets, and resources fully focused on business optimization, IT collaborates closely with lines of business, driving continuous improvements in outbound IT service levels, including high-governance workloads.

In this third and maturing phase, cloud computing demonstrably accelerates business agility, propelling the enterprise forward through:

•Greatly reduced time to market for critical business services and initiatives
•The consistent ability to anticipate and exploit market opportunities ahead of the competition
•Significant improvements in the customer experience
•Dramatically lower total cost of IT ownership

Why Choose VMware?

Built-In Compatibility with Your Existing Environment

Virtualization is the foundation for the cloud, and VMware is the acknowledged virtualization leader. Many of your workloads may already be VMware-virtualized, or you may just be starting out. Either way, by building your cloud on VMware, you extend the performance and capabilities of a platform you already have, with cloud technology engineered to fit seamlessly. Instead of having to rip and replace, you preserve and enhance the value of your current IT investment—free from compatibility worries or extensive customization costs.

Proven Real-World Methodology

Only VMware smoothes and streamlines your cloud transformation with The VMware Journey, a detailed yet flexible three-stage process based on best practices, KPIs, metrics, and proven strategies, and complemented by a year-over-year quantitative customer benchmark study of cloud benefits achieved.

Accelerate and Amplify Value at Every Phase.

The Journey is a self-reinforcing process in which IT capabilities and business value are incrementally realized and continuously build on one another. Each newly virtualized workload brings new reductions in cost and complexity together with corresponding gains in efficiency and quality of service. Likewise, an early investment in cloud computing amplifies these benefits by generating even greater cost savings and unprecedented business agility.

A Cloud that Adapts to You

Unlike other cloud offerings, VMware’s approach is not one-cloud-fits-all: our solutions are flexibly tailored to increase your agility in alignment with your specific business needs and IT objectives. At any point along the Journey, you can easily move workloads to your private datacenter cloud or to one of the many vCloud-enabled public clouds in our partner ecosystem. With VMware, you gain the freedom to determine which environment is best for each workload, and the ability to deploy it there without compromising security, reliability, or governance.