Modernize now or later? Explore your options.
Many motivating factors drive enterprises to modernize their application and data center environments. It could be: to address expiring data center contracts, a desire to reduce their data center footprint, an impending need to refresh aging hardware, a public cloud first strategy, or cutting costs and improving efficiency.
There are a variety of strategies for achieving these goals, each with its own pros and cons in terms of cost, effort, risk, value delivered and so on. The below outlines the major modernization paths open to you:
Relocate VMware to the cloud
This approach involves transferring your on-premise VMware environment to a public cloud platform. Major hyperscalers such as Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud offer the option to purchase VMware through their services, which saves you the procurement process and allows you to benefit from economies of scale.
Lift-and-shift Migration
This approach involves migrating applications to the public cloud without significant modifications. While this is a relatively fast and straightforward method, it doesn't fully address the comprehensive features VMware provides out-of-the-box. During migration, organizations must carefully consider aspects such as security, high availability, disaster recovery, networking, and storage.
It's important to note that workloads migrated using this method should not be considered in their final state. If companies refrain from pursuing post-migration modernization, cloud costs can be substantial for this option, especially for frequently used applications.
Evaluate hypervisor alternatives
This approach may be particularly suitable for enterprises that prefer maintaining a substantial on-premise footprint or those who aim to move to the cloud via a managed solution. Platforms like Nutanix and OpenShift Virtualization are among the available alternatives and can serve as long-term solutions. Diversifying hypervisor choices can provide more flexibility and potentially reduce costs in the short to medium term.
Embrace modernization
This strategy involves modernizing and migrating your applications to the cloud, leveraging containerization systems like Kubernetes for management and orchestration. By adopting this approach, you can harness the numerous benefits of cloud-native applications, including automated scaling and streamlined management. On-premise applications built with modern languages such as Java are particularly well-suited for this transition.
Although this approach requires a significant initial investment of time and resources, the long-term return on investment (ROI) is substantial. Modernization enhances application performance and scalability, and positions your organization to take full advantage of cloud technologies, potentially reducing operational costs and improving agility in the long run.
Retain the status quo
After analyzing the costs, budget, value, risks, resources, and complexities of migration, there will be cases and specific applications where the best option is not to make changes now. This may be a long-term solution or a short-term decision, based on current constraints. In the latter case, modernization should be rescheduled to a more opportune time.
Choosing the best path forward
According to Gartner®, “In the horizontal direction is the workload location (on- remises, off-premises). In the vertical direction is the provider (VMware, non-VMware). Even with this simple matrix, the vast array of potential alternatives is evident. These are among the more likely options, but many others may be applicable.”
What’s the right path for you? See where different cloud journeys lead
Many IT leaders are wondering how to evaluate what is the best path forward. At Amdocs, we work with our clients to build a journey that best addresses their needs, including modernization and migration to the public cloud. That’s because cloud and modernization align with the long-term goals of major enterprises. However, ideal doesn’t mean rigid. Some applications may not warrant modernization. A value-led approach, informed by Amdocs’ extensive experience and combined with GenAI-driven assessments, can help you make modernization choices that maximize ROI and simplify your path to the cloud.
As every IT leader knows, it’s easy to find areas that could be modernized. However, it’s wasteful to upgrade everything. You want to avoid both a “fix everything” approach and also an approach that fails to address pressing needs. For instance, lift-and-shift can deliver the best ROI for lightly used legacy applications. Workhorse systems may benefit from refactoring to a modern language and containerization in the cloud at scale. The goal is to migrate while prioritizing business value.
Amdocs uses AI to quickly assess customer environments for intelligent, data-driven decisions based on existing cloud and on-premises environments. It starts with a comprehensive assessment, followed by a phased migration plan where AI learns from each wave, continuously fine-tuning the next to ensure the most efficient and effective outcome. Extensive end-to-end testing ensures fast, cost-effective migrations without the common pitfalls. With a suite of accelerators, Amdocs helps establish secure landing zones, modernize networks, and address gaps created, driving faster, smoother, and more reliable transformations.
Opting for VMware in the cloud, reducing costs and enhancing efficiency (case study)
A banking giant in APAC wanted to reduce its on-premise footprint. Its on-premise environment centered around a private cloud that relied on VMware for virtual machines. The private cloud couldn’t scale or adapt to meet changing business requirements. The bank turned to Amdocs to help it migrate to the public cloud while retaining some of the familiar aspects of private cloud management. Our team built a scalable, multi-region platform using the Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE). The move not only reduced costs, it enhanced security and efficiency for the bank.
Taking the path to modernization at scale (case study)
An Amdocs client recently asked for help with surging costs. The company runs hundreds of apps on tens of thousands of virtual machines on VMware. Starting with an AI-driven assessment gave us a clear view of the current state. We then developed a strategy for mass containerization and cloud migration of critical applications and workloads. About 20% of apps offered limited modernization ROI. These moved to the public cloud with a lift-and-shift strategy, which let the team to focus on modernizing higher-ROI applications. When complete, the company will see dramatic cost savings along with the agility that comes with modernization.
Your modern future starts today
What is your plan for virtualization modernization? A value-led approach accelerates your journey and avoids the pitfalls of wasted effort. You use a roadmap based on ROI and efficiency to guide you to an agile, cloud-native future. Start creating your map to tomorrow – now. Talk to the Amdocs team about how we can help you as we are helping other clients like you - modernizing from the core to the customer.
*Source: Gartner, Manage Your Dependence on VMware vSphere, Michael Warrilow, Philip Dawson, 7 February 2024 (Report accessible to Gartner subscribers only)
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