By : Ahmed Auda
Managing Director, Middle East, Turkey & North Africa, VMware

Today’s organizations have three key requirements of their IT teams:
the agility to modernize applications at the speed the business
demands, the freedom to build and run them on the cloud of their
choice - whether in a data center or at the edge – and the resilience
afforded by enterprise-level security and operations.

For many businesses, however, the innovation required to deliver on
these requirements is being stifled by complexity. Cloud is often the
cause of this complexity if not managed correctly, but it can also
provide the solution.

I’d like to highlight my top three strategic lessons for making sure
your multi-cloud journey delivers success in both the short and long
term:



·         Lesson 1 – Start viewing cloud as a model rather than as a
place. The cloud is not a fixed location, but an entity that can grow
and be worked on by multiple teams. Its core, and everything that
governs it, needs to stay the same. Businesses should be aspiring to a
modern cloud infrastructure that is consistent everywhere, that
evolves and extends the infrastructure to thousands of other cloud
infrastructure partners. This consistency provides choice, while
avoiding complexity.



·         Lesson 2 - Success relies on continuous delivery. Ensuring
applications deliver consistent value to lines of business requires
careful care and provisioning of each and every application. This
relies on being able to understand and track the requirements and
performance of that application, and to understand what it needs, when
it needs it. Doing all of that manually is an impossible ask, which is
why a solution such as the new VMware Cloud Console, a single
monitoring and management environment for VMware Cloud infrastructure
regardless of where it’s deployed, is so significant.



·         Lesson 3 – Prioritise the apps that offer the most value.
It’s easy to get sucked into the “plan everything, complete nothing”
cycle, or opting to do a complete lift and shift of all your
applications without considering what’s required of each one. The
secret is in knowing which will provide business value quickest and
prioritising them. Before embarking on any cloud project, businesses
should ensure that they have done the work to identify these
applications, and the cloud environments that best suit them.



With 2021 described as the year of multi-cloud, businesses have never
been better placed to start harnessing the power of cloud and ushering
in a new era of applications. The flexibility and choice that it
offers enables best in class applications that in turn empower
companies to offer the user experiences that today’s consumers demand
and deserve.