Staying innovative and resilient may seem paradoxical, but increasingly they go hand in hand for IT teams, especially in the era of hybrid multicloud and AI. The rapid pace of change has made picking and sticking with a particular vendor more challenging. Understanding alternatives and having backup plans to mitigate unforeseen disruptions are now table stakes.
“Uncertainty is the enemy of IT,” Steve McDowell, chief analyst at NAND Research, told The Forecast by Nutanix.
“Consistency and predictability — that's all any IT leader wants. They have all these digital transformation projects and initiatives on their plates. They don’t need more distractions.”
Broadcom’s 2023 acquisition of VMware has become a major distraction for IT teams that rely on VMware software to power their data centers. The new VMware by Broadcom dramatically simplified its product lineup and licensing model, followed by other changes that impacted existing VMware customers and partners. This has driven many to explore alternatives and opportunities with other vendors.
It’s been a wake-up call for many, as cybersecurity and technology consultant Michael Hasse told The Forecast.
“Historically, the range of VMware products, both free and paid, has allowed up-and-coming IT folks to learn the system and adopt it as the preferred solution for a range of virtualization needs,” Hasse said.
Hasse said some of the changes closed long-existing on-ramps to VMware products.
“Over time, newer workers in the industry will have cut their teeth on other products and will see VMware ESXi as a legacy application,” Hasse noted.
An Opening for Alternatives
Broadcom’s backpedaling on some of its original decisions shows that the company not only misread the market but also misread the backlash, Hasse said. He saw top talent leave, and many have brought their skills to competitors.
“We can see already that a significant portion of their customer base, including many who would ostensibly still be supported, are closely examining alternatives and planning migrations with the assumption that VMware is not long for the world,” said Hasse.
He said the silver lining is that virtualization works in fundamentally the same way across all solution sets. Many of the extra bells and whistles VMware brought to the table are either already available from other vendors or will be soon.
“Going forward I expect we’ll see more features and functionality both within direct competitors to VMware and within these management tools, with many of the current small gaps in product fit being filled in rapidly.”
John Price, CEO of cybersecurity and risk advisory firm SubRosa, said the Broadcom VMware acquisition has put customers in a position where they must reassess existing contracts and future strategies that will impact their IT resilience.
Aside from disruptions like cyberattacks and natural disasters, Price said chief concerns when a major technology vendor is acquired include performance and reliability changes that might affect their service and product delivery, which also ties into business continuity.
Although VMware had a well-established suite of products, Price said integrating them into the Broadcom portfolio could lead to a change in VMware’s product roadmaps and even the actual suite of products itself. That could impact integration and compatibility with existing customers and their technology stacks.
“These customers are probably reassessing their business continuity frameworks and their plans,” Price said. “Broadcom’s vision for VMware might not have been what VMware’s vision for VMware was pre-acquisition.”
IT Resilience Demands Diversification
The Broadcom VMware acquisition reinforces the need for diversification as a best practice for maintaining IT resilience, according to Price.
“Utilizing multiple cloud service providers across your architecture is certainly one of the best practices,” he said.
This is essential for failover and recovery, particularly if that’s automated.
“Some cloud providers provide that service themselves, some don’t,” Price continued. “It’s something where you have to have some knowledge around and build yourself.”
Price advised that organizations aim to be “cloud-agnostic” if they want to maintain IT resilience across their architecture.
“If you're moving applications or moving services between different cloud platforms, you can do so easily as opposed to tying an application or a service to a specific cloud environment, such as AWS or Azure,” he explained.
He said geography should also be a factor so that an IT organization’s footprint spans across two or three cloud service providers for redundancy.
“Depending on the size of the footprint, you would have to make more considerations for different vendors as well as factoring in business continuity and disaster recovery scenarios,” said Price, who noted that companies in highly regulated industries like healthcare and financial services may have fewer options when selecting cloud service providers.
Reassessing Risk
Bev Gunn, global FSI ecosystem executive at Red Hat, said the Broadcom VMware acquisition is an opportunity for organizations to look at their IT resilience and see how they can be more impactful, cost-effective, secure and scalable — especially in the face of increasing regulatory requirements.
“When there's a little bit of disruption in the market, it’s an opportunity to step back and reassess how you’re doing things,” Gunn said.
Richard Harmon, vice president and global head of financial services at Red Hat, told The Forecast that IT resilience is about keeping your options open.
“When you need to change, you want to have the ability to change,” he said. “If you've locked yourself in, it can be very, very expensive and time-consuming for you to shift gears and run on something else or build it in a different way.”
Harmon added that Europe’s Digital Operation Resiliency Act (DORA) includes cloud providers because they are considered critical third-party platforms.
“Regulators are concerned that there is concentration risk,” he said. “At the same time, they want to ensure that firms are doing the right things to ensure that they have an exit strategy.”
He believes organizations should be able to run their applications anywhere on a hybrid multicloud environment. He said portability could mean running core banking or payments applications in one cloud, for example, but demonstrating that they can be run elsewhere if necessary.
According to Harmon, resiliency is as important to regulators as it is to enterprises. If five or six major banks are running on the same platform, for example, then the entire banking system goes down if that platform fails.
The flip side of multicloud IT resilience is vendor and cloud sprawl, which should be evaluated as a risk management exercise, suggested SubRosa’s Price.
“It comes down to the size of your architecture,” he said, adding that many enterprises are moving back to hybrid environments, or even back to colocation/self-hosted environments.
“We are seeing customers moving away from (the public) cloud. We’re certainly seeing a shift back to self-managed hardware.”
While that approach to IT resilience requires money and people who can support it, “there are certainly benefits that can be had from managing your own equipment and your own infrastructure from a security perspective and from a resiliency perspective,” explained Price.
But he cautioned that small businesses and startups should avoid managing their own infrastructure because of the inherent risks.
“For them, we would recommend a properly built cloud setup.”
