Cloud platforms are transforming the way organizations do business, and the competition between cloud providers is fierce. VMware and Amazon Web Services are partnering to provide cloud solutions to businesses in Canada.
At a roundtable in Toronto, data center company VMware, IT partner Scalar Decisions and AWS discussed how the new VMware Cloud on AWS service will open up new options for customers. The organizations hope that the new arrangement will act as a catalyst to get Canadian organizations, private and public, to the cloud.
Easing cloud migration for Canadian companies
The new offering from VMware and AWS looks to provide customers with powerful hybrid cloud options in order to help them benefit from AWS’ many capabilities. The new, on-demand service allows organizations working with VMware to extend, migrate and manage their cloud-based resources with the use of AWS services.
Sean Forkan, Vice President and Country Manager at VMware, stated that innovation in the public cloud is happening daily on a global scale, and thanks to VMware Cloud, Canadian companies can now benefit from these transformative shifts coming from within AWS.
The VMware Cloud service lives in the same region and availability as Amazon services, and is managed by VMware. Customers can be served both by AWS’ Montreal-based data centre or the U.S. data centre, depending on their data residency requirements. Over time both VMware and AWS hope to see a greater merger of the tools.
Peter Near, National Director of Solutions Engineering with VMware Canada, said that the transition to cloud services for businesses is not just a question of efficiency, but global performance. And while the majority of data sets on Canadian databases are not easy to migrate, Near predicted that the new offering from VMware and AWS provides these companies an ‘easy button’ for migration.
Transition to cloud has never been more popular
In a recent survey by multi-cloud management company RightScale, 95 percent of respondents said they are using cloud in some way. Hybrid and public cloud were far and away the most popular amongst adopters, with 85 percent of surveyed businesses citing some kind of hybrid cloud strategy, while only 10 percent of respondents cited the use of a single public cloud.
As Eric Gales, Director of AWS Canada, said during the roundtable, “It used to be that owning and operating infrastructure was an advantage.” According to Gales, eliminating the ownership and operation of costly infrastructure is at the heart of the pronounced increase in cloud adoption in Canada.
Gales noted that artificial intelligence and machine learning are also driving organizations towards the scalability and on-demand talent of public cloud services. AI and ML need a lot of computing, said Gales, and now VMware can use existing apps and workloads through AWS to accelerate and amplify the use of these apps. In terms of talent required to scale AI and ML tools, this could be a boon for medium-sized businesses, as the “surface area of new things they need to develop skills for or learn is lower,” said Gales.
