Why Cloud Foundation 9.x is the future of private cloud

What do businesses need from private clouds? As with so many aspects of business in general and business IT in particular, it's a question that has not one answer but many.

They want a total cost of ownership (TCO) that doesn't make the finance department wince. They want everything operable from a single console. They want security. And they want speed.

For a long time, however, speed and security have been seen as mutually exclusive. Want security? You need a private server in your offices. Want speed? It's time to leverage the mighty processing power of AWS and co.

This is the problem that VMware Cloud Foundation 9 solves. It gives businesses the scalability and agility of public cloud platforms with the robust security of an on-premises solution.

What's more, it can be used in all manner of environments – from customer-managed data centres to edge locations to cloud endpoints.

And within those environments, you can run pretty much any workloads you fancy. That stretches from traditional workloads to containers, AI/ML and other modern offerings.

What is VMware Cloud Foundation 9?

VMware Cloud Foundation 9 is a full-stack infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform. This means it abstracts from physical hardware all aspects of cloud infrastructure: compute, network, storage, security and management.

VM and container deployment can be automated, scaled and clustered, and the platform offers built-in resilience. It gives businesses the agility of the public cloud without the need to recruit new staff.

Simplification is the name of the game. From Day 0, Day 1 and Day 2 tasks all the way to full-stack deployment, VMware Cloud Foundation 9 simplifies, automates and orchestrates.

What's new?

VMware Cloud Foundation 9 is far from the only IaaS platform in town. What makes it so different and, well, so new?

According to Sabina Anja, Senior Technology Product Lead for VMware Cloud Foundation, the fundamental shift is that "private-cloud operations and private-cloud consumption are now the central part of the product while operating on top of our core innovation that our customers have learned to love and rely on".

Whatever you're doing, Anja explains, "you work from the same policy model, the same API surface and the same lifecycle engine.

"That consistency," she goes on, "trims learning curves for operators, removes friction for developers and – crucially – reduces the points of failure that appear when separate tools drift out of sync."

And by making life easier for operators and developers, businesses are in a stronger position to innovate and increase their profits. Not bad for a single piece of software.

What are the benefits of VMware Cloud Foundation 9?

1. The best of both worlds

For a long time, businesses stood at a fork in the road. In one direction lay the public cloud with its agility, scalability and speed. In the other, lay on-premises hardware, promising total administrative control.

Today, that choice has all but disappeared. An IaaS platform like VMware Cloud Foundation 9 lets businesses take both paths at once – or rather, to take one path towards speed and security.

Or, to put it in Anja's words: "With VCF 9.0, we're redefining what a modern private cloud can be – combining the speed and flexibility of the cloud experience with the performance, governance and cost control enterprises need on-prem." Win-win!

2. A unified cloud experience

In recent years, IT has more and more moved in the direction of the fabled "single pane of glass". This is a management console or dashboard that aggregates data from multiple sources and applications. It gives you visibility, clarity and ease of use.

And as cloud environments have grown more complex – and compliance measures more stringent – the need for a single pane of glass in cloud computing has grown ever more necessary.

VMware Cloud Foundation 9 provides this. Admins can set up infrastructure, configure new VMs or set up Kubernetes pods from the same place – a place, moreover, that's highly secure. Meanwhile, developers can use the same platform for their purposes.

On the face of it, VMware Cloud Foundation 9 is a sprawlingly complex beast. But at its heart is an emphasis on simplification.

3. Cyber resilience and platform security

Security has never been optional, but it's arguably never been more urgent. In the age of AI, cybersecurity threats are continuously evolving and continuously evading traditional defences.

VMware Cloud Foundation 9 protects everything: your core platform, your applications, your endpoints and your edge.

It does this in three main ways. First, it offers admins an easy-to-use security operations dashboard. Secondly, it offers configuration compliance and monitoring – continuously and automatically validating the infrastructure against industry security guidelines.

And finally, it offers identity and certificate management, securing, authenticating and authorising access across the whole VCF SDDC stack.

4. Lower TCO

All too often, businesses sacrifice operational efficiencies in favour of a more favourable TCO. VMware Cloud Foundation 9 gives you the best of both worlds.

It drastically reduces storage capacity needs, lets organisations run more workloads on fewer servers and lowers hardware acquisition costs. By automating upgrades and simplifying operations, it reduces manual labour, human error and time spent on management.

5. Supports a range of workloads

Modern businesses deal with a forbidding variety of workloads – from bare-metal VMs all the way to Kubernetes, containers and AI/ML.

VMware Cloud Foundation 9 lets you take charge of them all. This enables businesses to bridge the gap between their existing infrastructure investments and cutting-edge innovations.

It also lets them modernise at their own tempo. Like all of VMware's products, it provides a single safe, unified and scalable environment – not bitty infrastructures each with their own maintenance needs.

Ascend Cloud Solutions is a trusted team of digital transformation specialists based in Cork, Ireland. We help global clients accelerate their ambition with smart, strategic cloud computing solutions. Need support with a private cloud migration? Don't hesitate to get in touch with our experts.

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