VMworld 2018: VMware Aims to Make Cloud Management and Security Easier

Organizations are operating in a multicloud world, often juggling multiple public cloud environments and private clouds as well. All of that can be daunting to manage, especially for small and medium-sized businesses, which typically don’t have large IT teams.

At the VMworld 2018 conference in Las Vegas this week, VMware unveiled several enhancements to its cloud services portfolio that it hopes will make it significantly easier for IT teams to manage and secure cloud environments. The services are aimed at cloud operations, DevOps, and security and compliance teams, and are designed to help them better manage cloud costs, operations, security and compliance across multiple clouds.

The new features are part of VMware’s Software as a Service cloud operations platform and include three new cloud automation services: VMware Cloud Assembly, VMware Service Broker and VMware Code Stream. VMware also announced a new cloud configuration security and compliance service called VMware Secure State.

Learn how to maximize the benefits of cloud architectures.

VMware Wants to Ease the Burden of Multicloud Management

Citing 2017 data from Forrester Research, VMware noted that 89 percent of enterprises use at least two clouds, and 74 percent use at least three or more public clouds.

According to a 2017 study by Vanson Bourne commissioned by Veritas Technologies, with respect to Infrastructure as a Service specifically, 67 percent of organizations stated they used, or planned to use, two or more cloud providers, and 42 percent said they were using, or planned to use, three or more cloud providers.

Those complex cloud environments make it difficult for IT teams to gain the necessary visibility into their clouds, enforce compliance, ensure application performance and deliver security.

The new cloud services from VMware streamline application delivery, enable cloud flexibility and choice, and control risks, VMware says. They are also designed to facilitate cooperation between traditionally siloed groups within enterprises. Here is a quick breakdown of the new services:

• VMware Cloud Assembly is a multicloud orchestration tool designed to deliver unified provisioning across all clouds through declarative infrastructure as code. It works across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft’s Azure, and VMware Cloud on AWS. IT and cloud operations teams can use the service to orchestrate and expedite infrastructure and application delivery in a DevOps model. Meanwhile, VMware says, developers get an experience equivalent to provisioning resources from native public clouds.
• VMware Service Broker offers simple, self-service access to multicloud infrastructure and application resources from a single catalog, VMware says, allowing operations teams to more effectively govern access to resources; and use and enforce security, deployment and business policies across multicloud environments.
• VMware Code Stream automates the code and application release process with a comprehensive set of capabilities for app deployment, testing and troubleshooting. The service integrates with popular developer tools and supports VMware-based private clouds, VMware Cloud on AWS and native public clouds.
• VMware Secure State automates configuration security and compliance monitoring in native cloud environments, enabling IT teams to address violations of cloud configurations in real time. The service, VMware says, allows organizations to scale actionable security insights across cloud teams, helps prevent costly security breaches and fosters innovation.

Read more articles and check out videos from BizTech’s coverage of VMworld 2018 here.