Cloud mobility: normalizing the enterprise

1. Summary

Cloud mobility plays a key role in seamlessly extending on-premises assets to the public cloud. Enterprises don’t run on a single technology stack. A single enterprise will often run on mainframes, client-servers, as well as web and mobile platforms — all powered by diverse sets of technologies. Cloud is no exception, so in a typical topology, where each branch or department runs its own private cloud, managing consistent virtual-machine templates becomes complex. Businesses find that emulating their network topologies and configurations on the public cloud is difficult. That is a primary reason why, despite embracing virtualization a few years ago, IT has not widely adopted public cloud.

Customers consider more than one public-cloud provider so that they can minimize risk, but also so that they can achieve the best from each of the cloud platforms. But without standards and tools, moving workloads from one cloud provider to another is complex and expensive.

Cloud mobility is an emerging trend aimed at making workload migration across cloud platforms seamless. It also makes managing distributed private-cloud deployments efficient and cost-effective. This report will help IT teams understand cloud mobility and its impact on enterprise cloud adoption.

Key findings from the report include:

• Cloud-mobility platforms increase the ease with which businesses can move workloads between on-premises and public-cloud environments.
• Cloud mobility increases overall efficiency by allowing centralized resource management and reducing the “shadow IT” and “cloud sprawl” that plague many enterprises.
• Dev/test, disaster recovery, and hybrid-cloud environments are ideal use cases for cloud-mobility solutions.
• Businesses evaluating cloud-mobility solutions should pay special attention to automated self-service, APIs, and integration with existing mainstream hypervisors as well as private-cloud and public-cloud platforms.

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