4 Ways To Save 50% On Cloud

There’s plenty of talk — as well as evidence in the form of rising inflation, interest rates and energy prices — that the global economy is slowing and a recession is possible. Unsurprisingly, this has executives leaning even more into digital initiatives that promote efficiency and cost-cutting goals. Investing more in cloud is considered one of the few ways to achieve their optimization objectives, due to its high scalability, reliability and flexibility.

Despite the dim economic outlook, 59% of IT executives are optimistic that their cloud infrastructure spending will grow at (up to) a healthy 20% annual rate in 2023,¹ according to more than 450 enterprise technology executives VMware interviewed at the end of 2022. That’s approximately three times the expected growth rate of this year’s U.S. gross domestic product.

As with every other budget line item, business leaders must make sure they minimize the total cost of ownership (TCO) and reap the highest returns from their investments in public cloud. These are four ways to get started.

Action #1: Unify operations and standardize governance across clouds

Most organizations are running workloads and applications in two or more public clouds today and, when done right, multi-cloud can be a game changer. But managing diverse environments eats up your team’s time, runs up costs and exposes you to higher risks of breaches, lateral movement and ransomware attacks because you now have more vulnerabilities and blind spots in your infrastructure footprint. Then there’s your compliance burden. Ensuring governance operations are standardized and tightly controlled across public clouds, edge and on-premises resources takes another big bite from your staff support budget.

A multi-cloud management solution simplifies how you manage across all these domains by delivering a unified platform, a common data model and a single source of truth. When you gain these, you can:

• Achieve complete visibility into your cloud-consumption rate, making it easy to monitor, analyze and control cloud capacity and spend.
• Improve performance, secure configurations and comply with security and privacy mandates with automated, AI-based controls that apply consistent policies across your multi-cloud environment.
• Accelerate automated delivery of infrastructure and app services with simple, self-service tools that work across all clouds and can scale elastically on demand.

Action #2: Make your on-prem data center as efficient and scalable as public cloud

Everyone knows that one of the cloud’s greatest strengths is scalability. Not only is cloud significantly more cost-effective to scale up (or down) than on-prem environments, but by giving you the agility to scale in near-real-time, it dramatically beats the time required to provision and deploy physical infrastructure. What if you could achieve these cost savings and agility with a hybrid infrastructure that includes on-prem as well as cloud resources?

With a multi-cloud infrastructure solution, you can. It’s full-stack, hyperconverged infrastructure that gives you an easy-to-deploy architecture that extends your on-prem resources to the cloud — and multi-cloud. Your business is immediately more agile and flexible.

• Improve operational efficiency by extending the same infrastructure, operations, tools and processes to multi-cloud and on-prem workloads alike.
• Achieve business goals faster with cloud services that augment your on-prem deployments with cloud capabilities and deliver a public cloud experience.
• Accelerate your move to multi-cloud and take advantage of the latest cloud innovations within your on-prem data center.

Action #3: Leverage existing skillsets to adopt cloud faster and more securely

Your company, like so many others, may rely on in-house data centers and continue to manage your infrastructure with proven and trusted solutions from VMware. Your existing IT staff is already familiar with these tools, and these tools provide a consistent user experience regardless of which clouds you’re managing. You avoid having to hire additional staff, which eliminates significant costs.

At the same time, you’re aware of the advantages of moving to public cloud. A multi-cloud infrastructure solution like the VMware Cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform allows you to smoothly transition from on-prem to cloud using known and trusted solutions that keep migration costs low.

• Rapidly and cost-effectively modernize and migrate apps to cloud.
• Automate and scale workload deployment, networks and load balancers elastically.
• Deploy, manage and secure traditional and modern apps on a single secure platform.

Action #4: Automate Networking and Security, Strengthen Ransomware Defense

Lack of central controls for configuring, deploying and scaling workloads, networks and load balancers across multiple clouds can be tedious, error-prone and introduce more security risks. But a distributed, scale-out networking and security software architecture enables you to achieve a true cloud operating model — all with zero proprietary appliances and zero tickets yet Zero Trust.

Software-defined networking and security simplifies policy creation and management, workload migration and disaster recovery as well as application delivery. You can automate it all to deliver consistency, efficiency and a public cloud experience, everywhere. Enforce a strong ransomware defense with lateral security and protect the inner workings of your traditional and modern apps by understanding the connections and conversations to find and evict threat actors before they do serious damage — even those using legitimate ports and protocols.

• Automate networking, security and advanced load balancing to enable a true cloud operating model across the lifecycle of your operation.
• Enforce a strong ransomware defense with lateral security and disaster recovery.
• Deliver consistent, elastic connectivity and security with high availability across on-prem and any cloud.

Multi-Cloud Infrastructure with VMware Cloud Lowers TCO

VMware Cloud supports all four actions, providing the easiest and most cost-effective path to enterprise multi-cloud. By the time you consider all the resources you need to fully support an enterprise application as a native cloud instance in a traditional public cloud environment, it’s often nearly twice that of VMware Cloud.

VMware Cloud is a fully managed, multi-cloud-ready, IaaS platform for all enterprise applications. With it, your cloud operations teams get a single platform to manage both traditional and modern apps, which is important for increasing your operational efficiency as well as aligning your business by giving your teams the flexibility to develop and deploy any type of app on any cloud that makes sense. It also helps simplify and speed enterprise app migration from the data center to the cloud of your choice. From there, your team can migrate applications and modernize in a timeframe that best achieves your business objectives.

The following results² from hundreds of customer deployments of VMware Cloud running in a public cloud compared to an instance-based traditional public cloud model illustrate the platform’s cost advantages:

• 27% savings by including enterprise support and persistent storage – With public cloud, you pay individually for compute as well as enterprise-class support and a persistent share of storage. Integrated VMware Cloud includes all this out of the box.
• 7% savings from better hardware utilization – VMware Cloud runs in a host model that allows for over-subscribing and optimizing the memory, compute and storage that comes standard on elastic bare metal hardware in the public cloud. By driving up your underlying hardware utilization, you save money.

• 4% savings with free advanced services – Public cloud providers charge you more for additional network and security services. These are included in VMware Cloud.
• 12% savings due to no refactoring migrations – If your teams already use VMware vSphere on-prem, migrating to one or more public clouds is easier, more cost-efficient and lower risk when moving to VMware Cloud for whatever public clouds you choose.

If you’re doing the math, this adds up to 50% savings. Not a bad way to kick off the new year!

Learn more about how to save with cloud in 2023. Get your TCO analysis.

VMware Cloud on AWS TCO tool