Apurva Thanawala |
One way to accelerate your digital transformation is to start modernising and scaling out your applications running on-premises that use the multi-cloud services provided by VMware.
But there can be challenges. Existing investments in VMware technologies, tools and architectures do not support the business case for immediately modernising a business with cloud-native technologies. Limited reskilling and training budgets, as well as a competitive cloud skills market, makes it difficult for businesses to ramp up skills to align modernisation requirements. Cloud modernisation requires them to restructure and rewrite applications, which generates project life cycle and development costs.
Azure VMware Solution (AVS) addresses some of the challenges associated with migrating on-premises VMware workloads to Microsoft Azure by providing a comprehensive VMware environment on the Azure infrastructure. This enables organisations to run these workloads natively as an Azure service and to manage and secure applications across VMware environments and Azure.
A 2021 Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Microsoft titled New Technology: The Projected Total Economic Impact of Microsoft Azure VMware Solution highlighted the potential financial benefits a composite organisation could achieve by deploying the Azure VMware Solution over three years. For example, businesses can retain personnel who have VMware skills by redeploying and extending VMware workloads, and they reclaim over 75 per cent of application downtime by deploying key VMware workloads on Microsoft Azure.
At Kyndryl, we can help organisations to discover and assess on-premises workloads and identify how they can use AVS for those workloads. We can then design, build and implement the AVS environment based on the identified use cases, before provisioning and migrating workloads from on-premises to AVS by leveraging Azure-native migration tools. Kyndryl can then monitor, operate and govern the AVS environment and the workloads running on them through VMware and Azure-native tools.
AVS provides a fast path to cloud migration for existing VMware workloads and sets up the stage for application modernisation, allowing customers to benefit from data centre exits, avoid expensive on-premises infrastructure refreshes and safeguarding their existing investments in people and tools.
Kyndryl worked with a customer that needed to urgently relocate four very critical applications and migrate 500 virtual machines to Azure because its IT supplier stopped outsourcing activities. Azure VMware Solution was used in concert with Kyndryl end-to-end services to migrate the virtual machines in three months without any customer application transformation, with Kyndryl implementing the landing zone and migration on time while managing the workloads on Azure.
With the combination of Kyndryl and AVS, customers can now move critical applications to Azure with little to no restructuring, accelerating time to value.
Find the AVS Discovery Workshop on Azure Marketplace at: https://bit.ly/3S0s3xJ
Apurva Thanawala is offering manager for cloud services at Kyndryl
This article was originally published in the Autumn 2022 issue of Technology Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.