Cloud

VMware Explore 2022: Key Takeaways from This Year’s Conference

Multicloud was a hot topic at this year’s hybrid event.

Joe Kuehne is an Associate Editorial Director at BizTech magazine.

This year’s VMware Explore 2022 marked a change from recent years. Not only was this the first event of the past few years to have an in-person component, but organizers have given it a new name.

“When we started VMworld, it was a community for data center professionals, and we grew the community,” said VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram. “But over the years, we have grown, and it’s no longer just about the data center. It’s about all of these roles that I just talked about, not only the data center, but across clouds and the edge. It is truly a multicloud community these days.”

Throughout the event, executives praised the multicloud operating model, explaining its advantages, offering use cases and describing new challenges resulting from the rapid migration to the cloud.

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The Importance of Reducing Complexity in the Cloud

The multicloud approach is becoming quite common for organizations across industries, and while it offers many benefits, the use of more than one cloud can sometimes introduce unwanted complexity.

Mark Lohmeyer, senior vice president and general manager of VMware’s cloud infrastructure business group, addressed the complications of a multicloud operating model. “With this distributed environment comes a whole new set of challenges that spring up from the fact that we now have these different cloud silos, different operating models, different skill sets, and tools and processes. Different service-level agreements and different security models, ultimately, for many environments, lead to slower time to value, higher risk and higher cost.”

Lohmeyer enumerated the ways VMware’s new cloud offerings are enabling its customers to achieve their business outcomes through modernizing an organization’s infrastructure, operating model and applications. “Taken together, we think this is a really compelling architecture for where we see the world going,” he said.

VMware Unveils Enhancements to Cloud Security Products

In the opening keynote of the event, VMware announced several product innovations designed to optimize organizations’ multicloud operations.

To assist with security and network connectivity, the company introduced Project Northstar. According to a press release, “Project Northstar will transform how enterprises consume networking and security in a multi-cloud world. Project Northstar will deliver multi-cloud networking, security, workload mobility and end-to-end threat detection and response with a centralized cloud-console for consistent and simplified software-as-a-service (SaaS) consumption.”

The company introduced related security enhancements, including the VMware NSX Gateway Firewall and the VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer to “help customers preserve their investments in expensive hardware appliances that are incapable of adapting to changing app environments.”

Keep this page bookmarked for articles from the event, and follow us on Twitter at @BizTechMagazine and the official conference Twitter feed, @VMwareExplore.