Cloud computing is the antidote to inflexible, overly complex IT infrastructures. It’s not an end state you can jump to instantaneously, but a transition achieved in stages. To guide and assist you on your path, VMware provides The VMware Journey, a proven and practical implementation roadmap designed to deliver benefits as you go.

During each phase, IT becomes more agile, responsive, and efficient; ROI increases while IT costs go down. The journey culminates in a cloud that is uniquely yours—a private, public, or hybrid cloud environment perfectly aligned with your individual business needs and goals.

Phase 2: Business Production

In this phase, the cloud computing initiative expands beyond IT assets to the company’s business-critical applications with the support of application owners. Advanced VMware cloud computing capabilities drive performance, security, and service levels to previously unattainable heights.

Delivering Higher Quality of Service for Business-Critical Applications

The emphasis in Phase 2 is improving application availability and SLAs to the business. At this juncture, cloud computing sponsorship shifts to the owners of business applications. Having taken notice of the Phase 1 benefits achieved for IT-specific applications, these owners begin to request the same improvements for their production application services. With the support of these stakeholders, IT begins virtualizing the company’s business-critical, multi-tier applications such as supply chain, finance, human resources and other commercial packaged applications. The enterprise may opt to shift some of these workloads to VMware vCloud-enabled public cloud services, initiating a strategic move to hybrid cloud architecture.

At the same time, the private cloud infrastructure is enriched and augmented with solutions for performance optimization, high availability, and disaster recovery. An automation plan is implemented to manage application delivery based upon defined business rules, policies, and agreed service-level requirements.

As a direct result of Phase 2 innovations, the enterprise achieves:

• Significantly improved application performance and availability
• Reduced maintenance downtime
• Further gains in efficiency and reductions in operational expenses
• On-demand, automated allocation of IT resources when and where needed
• Better-than-physical security for infrastructure, applications, and data alike