Disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic are accelerating a global trend to migrate to some form of cloud, presenting growth opportunities for vendors such as VMware.
This is according to Dave Funnell, Cloud Provider Manager at VMware, Sub-Saharan Africa, who expects an accelerated shift to cloud in the medium term.
CIO focus is expected to switch from areas such as disaster recovery, business continuity, secure access and collaboration to digital transformation, with a focus on customer engagement and data value, cloud, innovation accelerators and budget, according to IDC.
“In the short term, organisations had to focus their efforts on moving quickly to mobilise a remote workforce. This is a trend we see accelerating now, since if employees can’t be productive, it doesn’t matter what else you do. You have to enable them and keep them secure.”
Enterprises had to deliver digital workspaces on organisational or personal endpoints to access critical applications, protect those endpoints, accelerate the performance of applications on remote connections and provide elastic capacity to scale new users instantly and on demand.
“But with the impacts of the pandemic likely to continue for much of this year at least, and remote work to become the norm for many, we can expect to see the next phase: the acceleration of the journey to cloud services across public, private and hybrid cloud, and managed services on top of that, and the partners who are supporting this will be in a stronger position than those who relied on traditional delivery models,” he says. “For VMware, it has been business as usual, and we are relatively optimistic about the future, with the solutions we offer in growing demand.”
Funnell says the pandemic has simply fast-tracked a trend that was developing pre-COVID-19. “This will accelerate the consumption of cloud services, and there will be a real capex to opex shift, with South African organisations moving rapidly to a hybrid multi-cloud environment.”
To move rapidly and at scale, Funnell expects to see traditional systems and applications moved to private cloud environments first. “Organisations will move to shut down their data centres – the days of running a data centre in the basement are over,” he says.
Funnell further explains that organisations will accelerate the move of their application workloads to private clouds for rapid migration, predictable cost and predictable performance.
On top of that, organisations will start modernising legacy applications while at the same time embracing the exponential growth expected in the number of next generation applications in the public cloud, from around 335 million in the world today, to up to 800 million applications by 2025.
Organisations will move to shut down their data centres.
Dave Funnell, VMware
VMware says application workloads will be the key driver of cloud adoption in the coming years. Choosing the right platforms for the right applications, and managing a multi-cloud environment, could bring new complexity.
Amid the disruption, the vendor community is moving to support customers as they migrate, says Funnell. “In our business, vendors are trying to support and assist partners and customers – we don’t want be the agent putting a partner under pressure, meaning they can’t deliver to their customers."
Funnell will present a talk sponsored by VMware on the effect of the current pandemic on the cloud and managed services in The impact of COVID-19 on digital transformation webinar series, to be run by ITWeb on 7, 8 and 9 July 2020.
He will address issues such as the IT skill sets and investments that support existing application environments, how to migrate these environments rapidly to the cloud, and how to manage, run and secure business applications across multiple private and public hyperscale clouds.
For more information on this webinar series, and to reserve a spot, click here.
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