Why, despite the inherent advantages of cloud, do 80 percent of mission-critical workloads and sensitive data remain on premise? This question loomed large at a specially-convened CBR Dining Club event, in association with IBM, which took place in early February.
The theme of the evening, ‘Moving VMware workloads to the cloud’, traded on the complementary benefits of virtualisation and cloud computing – namely, combining the efficiency and effectiveness of the virtual machine with the agility and elasticity of cloud.
For a taste of the evening of what was discussed on the evening, please watch our video interview with Lucas Wager , UKI Cloud Platform VMware Leader , IBM .
Opening the discussion, Lucas Wager, Cloud Sales Manager at IBM, suggested the 20 percent of workloads currently on cloud were there because migration was relatively easy. In some cases, these were “born-on-the-cloud workloads”, he said.
The remaining 80 per cent were more complex, often for applications that were out of support or where the location of data was limited by regulation. Performance is another area of concern. “Some businesses are saying, ‘I can’t afford a second of outage.” Lucas, featured in the video interview above, said IBM’s mission was to tackle those more complex, often VMware-based, workloads that remain on premise by demonstrating to businesses what was possible. We need to take the fear out of the process, he said.
Bharat Bhushan, CTO for Banking and Financial Markets at IBM UK, took a step back by grounding infrastructure decisions in the fundamentals of business objectives. Bhushan said organisations want to do four things: grow revenue, retain customers, attract new customers and operate efficiently (a 30-40 percent cost-to-income ratio when it came to financial services).
These drivers mean they are looking for faster, frictionless and more efficient straight-through processing. This often leads them to the cloud. Increasingly IBM is helping firms realise those efficiencies, Bhushan said, by splitting out larger applications and transforming them into microservices that could reside effectively and efficiently on the cloud.
Among the factors delegates said informed their cloud decision making were data sovereignty, service level guarantees and levels of latency.
VMware Solutions for IBM Cloud is currently available at over 60 data centres around the world.
‘Moving VMware workloads to the cloud’, a CBR Dining Club event in association with IBM, took place on 7 February 2019 at the Dorchester Hotel, London.
For more information on IBM’s workload solutions , just click here.
