‘Astonishing Opportunities’ Coming From Rapid Cloud Migration

A new survey shows a major shift in VMware environments, with nine in 10 (90 percent) companies aiming to migrate their workloads to the cloud by 2018.

Respondents in the Druva 2017 VMware Cloud Migration Survey show a clear preference for Amazon Web Services (AWS) (47 percent), followed by Microsoft Azure (25 percent).

Timm Hoyt, Druva’s vice president of global channel sales, tells Channel Partners the shift will provide “astonishing opportunities” for partners to bridge the gap between on-premises and cloud. The survey was completed by nearly 450 IT pros from multiple industries who run VMware systems.

“Regarding hybrid cloud, 42 percent will have virtual infrastructure both on premises and in the cloud, which is where the traditional reseller will shine,” he said. “For example, a reseller can help a client modernize their data center by collapsing legacy three-tier architecture (i.e., server, network, storage) with hyperconverged offerings from vendors like Nutanix, who we share a strong partnership with.”

Disaster recovery (DR), workload mobility and archival automation were strong adoption drivers, with many organizations looking to save money and to maximize IT initiatives focused on simplifying their infrastructure, the survey noted.

Druva’s Dave Packer

Four in five (81 percent) respondents believe DR for virtual machines is a core need. More than half reported wanting a single, central offering that would protect their data in either a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environment.

Almost two-thirds (63 percent) of respondents expressed that they are considering alternate hypervisors. This figure demonstrates a growing desire to build applications natively in the cloud instead of replicating VMware environments on public cloud platforms, according to the survey.

“The shift toward moving virtual workloads to the cloud is not just about cost; it’s an initiative that’s seen as critical to IT and business needs,” said Dave Packer, Druva’s vice president product marketing. “Downtime and poor application performance can be devastating to productivity, and we see an insatiable appetite by business users for a SaaS-based approach to solving seamless connectivity, access, functionality and cloud integration challenges.”

Druva unveiled a new cloud platform this week.