VMware Strategic IT Priorities

As IT organizations leverage their existing data center environments, they are facing challenges on multiple fronts. Many are grappling with legacy systems that can’t deliver the agility and flexibility businesses require to thrive. IT departments also face shrinking or static budgets that make it impossible to reliably meet business demands with traditional infrastructure models. And cross-functional workflow and approval processes slow the organization’s speed to market with innovation.

In some cases, line-of-business organizations are deploying public and hybrid cloud services that can deliver the agility and flexibility to solve issues that internal IT organizations might find themselves struggling with. However, public cloud adoption can create operational cloud silos and compliance risks. IT needs to find new ways to offer services seamlessly and securely across private and public clouds.

To keep pace with escalating business demands, organizations need an agile, service-oriented IT model for data centers that leverages both their on-premises data center resources and public clouds. Not long ago, highly dynamic, available and programmatic compute, storage, network and security services could give businesses an edge over competitors. Today, these capabilities are simply the standard by which all organizations operate. Organizations need to quickly move forward on their journey toward an agile, flexible and modern Software-Defined Data Center environment—or risk being left behind.

Public clouds provide organizations with new opportunities to scale their operations, accelerate service delivery and reduce costs. To drive agility up and costs down, IT leaders want to institutionalize the use of public clouds. They seek to take advantage of the benefits of public clouds and enable their businesses to use them freely, making the right cloud choice based on the requirements of individual workloads. However, they want to do so in a way that prevents the emergence of cloud silos.

Organizations are looking to simplify the operation of multicloud environments by adopting common solutions for management, networking and security. They want visibility into the cost and performance of their applications across their clouds and they require enterprise class security.

New technologies such as cloud and mobility are rapidly changing the way people work and live, and they are having a profound impact on business strategy. A growing percentage of today’s workforce wants the flexibility, convenience and productivity that mobile solutions provide. They believe in collaborative work styles and the freedom to work from anywhere, on the devices and apps they choose.

Organizations want greater agility as well, and businesses are reinventing their processes to take advantage of mobile and cloud technologies that maximize operational efficiency and effectiveness. They’re also looking to empower their employees by delivering a superior end-user experience, regardless of where they are working and which devices they are using.

The traditional ways of managing, securing and supporting workforces, apps and data don’t always meet business needs. To embrace new opportunities and address new challenges, businesses across every industry are exploring new solutions that can help them empower a more productive, cost-effective and agile organization.

Legacy networking models are not keeping pace with the rapidly changing demands of modern business that rely on the cloud and edge services – thus holding back digital business transformation initiatives and strategies. Additionally, the proliferation of distributed applications and services across mobile endpoints, IoT, data centers, public clouds, SaaS, branches and the edge now require a new approach to how security is designed and deployed. To be effective, networking and cybersecurity must be an inherent part of the of the infrastructure.

The network of the future is software-defined. It must be a ubiquitous software layer from data center to cloud to edge infrastructure to provide a secure, consistent foundation that drives your business forward. This requires IT to utilize software to enable customers to connect securely and operate an end-to-end architecture delivering services to applications and data.