Making the Cloud of Dreams Real

The transition to consuming IT as a service is accelerating rapidly across all industries. Paying for the services and infrastructure you need when you need it is a game changer for organizations that want to reduce upfront expenditures and ongoing maintenance for the infrastructure they need to run their business. APEX Cloud Services with VMware Cloud delivers this and more, addressing customer’s challenges and helping them achieve their business objectives. This exciting release changes the game for adopting a powerful on-premises cloud platform.

We have a lot of experience working with customers who are adopting their cloud strategy and realizing the benefits as they mature. We’ve learned many lessons on what works, what doesn’t work, and what organizations need to do to be successful in operationalizing their cloud and using it to achieve outcomes.

APEX Cloud Services with VMware Cloud makes it simple for an IT organization to order additional compute, similar to how they would consume public cloud resources. So, how do we bring that simplicity to the business stakeholder?

Cloud of Dreams

If there is one truism about cloud we’ve found over the years it’s that “if you build it, they will come” is simply not true. Many organizations have spent countless hours of effort to create brand new greenfield, sparkling, artisanal cloud platforms and they expect this hard work will be rewarded by consumption. While this is a great start towards cloud adoption, there are other areas organizations need to focus on to drive adoption.

Developers and other business stakeholders of the cloud need their data in the cloud before they’re willing to use it. We help organizations drive consumption of their cloud platforms by migrating data and workloads first. Once these workloads are moved to the cloud, net-new workloads will be deployed there as well.

Batteries Included

Of course, migrating workloads into the cloud on its own is not enough to drive consumption of your shiny new cloud. A cloud is only as successful as the services and functionality that if offers.

Remember as a kid when you unwrapped that toy you had been wanting so badly only to discover the dreaded “batteries not included” message printed on the box? Cloud platforms are not that different. When you unwrap your cloud and take it out of the box, it needs to come with those batteries.

In this case, those batteries include the automations and integrations that your organization needs. It needs to be integrated together such that it meshes seamlessly with the organization’s IT workflow and lifecycle. It needs to have automated services that provide a seamless experience that helps developers and other stakeholders get what they need when they need it. Finally, it needs to have a populated service catalog to enable end-users to start consuming the cloud on day one.

A shiny cloud with blinking lights in the data center and a login prompt to an empty service catalog just won’t cut it.