No refactoring required: A painless path to cloud adoption

Cloud computing has been a major force in enterprise technology for two decades. But according to a Barclays report issued last year, only 42% of workloads reside in the public cloud, despite the benefits of running workloads in the cloud.

Moving workloads to the cloud can enable enterprises to decommission hardware to reduce maintenance, management, and capital expenses. Cloud-based workloads can burst as needed, because IT can easily add more compute and storage capacity on-demand to handle spikes in usage, such as during tax season for an accounting firm or on Black Friday for an e-commerce site. Applications can be connected to powerful artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics cloud services, and, in some cases, putting workloads in the cloud moves them closer to the data they need in order to run, improving performance.

Historic challenges of cloud migration

With all these benefits, why are most workloads still living outside of the cloud? Migration has posed significant challenges, including the perceived need to refactor applications for the cloud, for IT teams. Refactoring is an expensive, time-consuming task that carries risk, especially for key revenue-generating applications.

“We are in constant tension between revenue and modernization, and every time revenue wins,” says an IT executive at a large enterprise.

Operational readiness is another factor. Enterprise IT has made heavy investments in on-premises management tools and employee training, so it is able to use them effectively. Retraining admins on new tools to manage cloud environments requires time and money.

There are also application dependencies to consider. No application is an island; each relies on a complex web of interconnected apps and resources, which must be remapped to the cloud environment.

A simpler solution

Broadcom and Google Cloud are collaborating to enable enterprise IT to nondisruptively extend their on-prem environments to the cloud and easily run workloads in Google Cloud VMware Engine — without having to make any changes to the architecture. There’s no downtime, and all networking and dependencies are retained.

Admins don’t need to retrain; they can use the same tools they use for their on-premises infrastructure to manage virtual machines (VMs) in Google Cloud. The partnership also enables VMware license portability between on-prem and Google Cloud environments, providing the enterprise with significant flexibility to move VMs wherever they’re needed.

There are many compelling use cases for running VMs in Google Cloud VMware Engine, including:

• Data center extension. Retain workloads in the data center, and leverage the cloud to manage bursts when more capacity is needed.
• Refresh cycle. If it’s time to replace older hardware, IT can migrate workloads to Google Cloud VMware Engine instead of buying new equipment.
• Relocating workloads. If a colocation facility is shutting down, IT can migrate effortlessly to Google Cloud instead of moving to another physical location.
• Disaster recovery. Instead of fully mirroring the data center in another physical location, IT can stand up a fractional environment in Google Cloud VMware Engine, where the network is already configured and storage is replicated. In the event of a disaster, IT can scale up on demand, which means that the enterprise doesn’t need to pay for the resources required for the full environment until they are needed.
• Enhancing applications. With your apps in Google Cloud VMware Engine, leverage private high-bandwidth, low-latency access to Google Cloud services such as AI and analytics to deliver new innovative services and extract meaningful insights from your data.

“With this partnership, enterprises can easily and without disruption move their virtualized applications to Google Cloud and operations don’t have to change at all,” says Marcos Hernandez, platform engineering lead at Google Cloud. “Migration could even be the start of a multistep approach to keep evolving those applications into higher compute abstractions. But for many customers, simply migrating gives them all the benefits they need.”

Find out how easy it is to extend from on-prem to the cloud and migrate your workloads to Google Cloud VMware Engine. More information can be found by clicking here.