What is Azure VMware Solution?

Imagine that you're standing in the middle of the King's Cross St. Pancras Station in London. You know where you need to go but looking at the colourful Underground map on the wall, getting there can seem complex. With all the lines and potential switches, what's the easiest route to get to your destination?

When it comes to migrating your tech stack to the cloud, it can feel a lot like standing in a Tube station staring at a map—there are plenty of routes, many of them dotted with stops along the way. But what's the ideal route for your cloud journey? What's the best path forward for your organisation?

There are a number of factors to consider, including your evolving business priorities and your existing investments in people, skills, and on-premises infrastructure. And how best to modernise and advance the diverse set of applications that run your workloads to keep your business thriving.

Introducing the Azure VMware Solution

As you look to the cloud to empower your expanding remote workforce—and to gain the agility to meet the demands of the ever-evolving global digital business landscape—finding ease and simplicity may at first seem challenging. But among all the various routes for migrating to the cloud, did you know there's a path forward that will enable you to accelerate your cloud migration at your own pace? That path is with the power of Azure VMware Solution (AVS).

On a basic level, AVS lets you seamlessly move VMware workloads from your datacentre to Azure and integrate additional Azure services with ease—all while continuing to manage your IT environments with the same VMware tools you already know. On this route, you have the choice and flexibility to determine what workloads to migrate, and you decide the right time to migrate them. With platform symmetry, you have complete control to transform based on how your organisation defines its unique cloud journey.

Reduce migration complexity

Cloud migration undoubtedly involves a variety of variables: staff readiness, current processes, IT support and management, to name a few. With AVS, you access and manage your VMware environments using familiar VMware tools without needing to retrain staff or even replatform the hypervisors. In fact, your operations remain consistent with direct administrative access to VMware vSphere interfaces.

We've seen many organizations, large and small, that have successfully accelerated migration and minimized downtime using the latest VMware HCX Enterprise functionality for large-scale, live migration from on-premises to Azure. And using VMware vMotion from vCenter, you have the ability to migrate live VMs from on-premises to Azure without any downtime.

With the option to select from a large variety of migration methods, including cold, warm, with or without replication, or live without replication, AVS provides the best route to migrate what you want and when it's best suited for your specific business goals.

Modernise securely

Modernisation of your VMware infrastructure and applications gives you agility to adapt to future market and technology disruptions and unforeseen changes in technology, customers, and the competition. But, of course, you want to achieve all this goodness in a highly secure way.

With the continued rise in challenges presented by remote workers and the frequency and sophistication of nation-state attacks, security concerns, whether with a hybrid cloud or a multi-cloud approach, unsurprisingly, are on the rise. More than 60% of organisations say security and compliance are "critical," and the first consideration in vendor or service provider selection for hybrid cloud planning.*

A cloud migration with AVS provides access to Azure's built-in security capabilities across all your cloud resources and all layers of your architecture. It's easy to turn on through every stage of the development lifecycle, from native controls for the DevOps process to scalable security experiences for security operations teams.

Azure security is holistic. This isn't just about protecting Azure; it's about protecting your entire organisation. It works with what you have and provides you the ability to protect workloads quickly with built-in controls and services. Threat protection with Azure Monitoring and Security Centre means you can be confident you're protected against rapidly evolving threats during your cloud journey.

Helping you save

Last but not least, moving to the cloud has clear economic benefits. The AVS route lets you convert upfront capital expenditures into operating expenditures and pay as you consume. Running your VMware environment in Azure allows you to scale up and down to meet demand, so you don't have to overprovision resources to be ready for peak usage and incur expenses on idle servers.

As part of the migration to Azure, you'll have access to the Azure Hybrid Benefit. This licensing benefit is exclusive to Azure, enabling you to use your on-premises Software Assurance-enabled Windows Server and SQL Server licenses on Azure.

Time to claim your ticket

No matter whether you're exploring options for exiting your datacentre, need a solution to support flexible capacity in the cloud, or looking to modernise at your own pace, your route to the cloud is clear. And your ticket on the AVS train is waiting.

Drive scale, gain operational efficiencies, maintain operational processes, and focus on what matters most to your organisation. Go Business Class with Azure VMware Solution.

Thinking about this solution? We can help. UBDS is the go-to digital transformation partner to the public and private sectors. We are Azure Microsoft Gold Partners with Advanced Specialisation in Networking Services and a VMware Principal Partner in Networking and Security and the only partner globally to have the SD-WAN Master Services Competency. Contact us today.

*Source: NTT 2021 Hybrid Cloud Report