News

VMware To Help Customers Use AWS, Other Public Clouds

• By David Ramel
• 08/29/2016

Despite offering its own vCloud Air public cloud platform, VMware Inc. is developing a new service to help customers use public cloud services including Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) and platforms from Microsoft and IBM.

Today, the first day of its VMworld 2016 conference in Las Vegas, VMware announced a technology preview of Cross-Cloud Services "to showcase how customers can manage, govern and secure applications running in private and public clouds, including AWS, Azure and IBM Cloud."

Some industry pundits described the move as VMware giving up on the public cloud space and ceding the market to the unquestioned leaders, rather than continuing to bet on vCloud Air, which is described as "a secure public cloud platform offering compute, storage, networking, disaster recovery and more."

In a statement today, VMware said: "Cross-Cloud Services are new Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings under development to enable visibility into cloud usage and costs, enhance consistent networking and security policies, and automate the deployment, management, and migration of applications and data across vSphere and non-vSphere private and public clouds. With a common operating environment for both public clouds and on-premises workloads, central IT can protect data and applications and control costs while enabling developers and the business to innovate freely in the clouds they choose."

VMware said the Cross-Cloud Services being previewed at VMworld include:

• Discovery and analytics: enabling discovery, onboarding, and governance of public cloud applications.
• Compliance and security: using micro-segmentation and monitoring to provide security and compliance for applications across clouds.
• Deployment and migration: providing developers the ability to work cross-cloud, and IT the ability to manage cross-cloud applications with security and compliance​.

The company isn't giving up on vCloud Air completely, however, as it also announced:

• VMware vCloud Availability, a new family of disaster recovery offerings purpose-built for vCloud Air Network partners.
• A new release of VMware vCloud Air Hybrid Cloud Manager to provide VMware vSphere users zero downtime application migration to VMware vCloud Air.

"Customers are increasingly relying on multiple public and private clouds to run their applications, but are daunted by the challenge of managing and securing applications across diverse cloud platforms," said exec Raghu Raghuram in today's statement. "When customers combine a best-in-class private cloud with leading public clouds, all enabled by VMware, they have the strongest, most flexible hybrid cloud strategy. VMware is delivering cloud freedom and control by providing a common operating environment for all clouds with our unique Cross-Cloud Architecture."

The company also provided more details about that Cross-Cloud Architecture.

"As the world's most complete and capable hybrid cloud architecture, the Cross-Cloud Architecture enables consistent deployment models, security policies, visibility, and governance for all applications, running on-premises and off-premises, regardless of the underlying cloud, hardware platform or hypervisor," it said. "VMware's Cross-Cloud Architecture builds on its leading private and hybrid cloud capabilities by offering customers the freedom to innovate in multiple clouds, and is delivered through VMware Cloud Foundation, a new set of Cross-Cloud Services which VMware is developing and the VMware vRealize cloud management platform."

More on VMware's announcements can be found on our sister publication Redmond Magazine in the article "VMware's Cross-Cloud Services Aims To Tie Largest Providers Together".