VMware’s UK service expansion demonstrates the company’s commitment to provide customers a Hybrid Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) footprint internationally and marks the beginning of a planned rollout of VMware vCloud Hybrid Service across key European locations.
“Customer response to the UK public beta of VMware vCloud® Hybrid Service™ has been tremendous,” said Gavin Jackson, vice president & general manager, Cloud Services EMEA, VMware. “VMware is uniquely positioned to deliver the best of both worlds: the compelling economics and agility of a public cloud, yet fully compatible with a customer’s existing data center, applications, management tools, networking and security. As a result, VMware vCloud Hybrid Service solves key business issues allowing organizations to seamlessly extend their data centers to the cloud – linking both private and public cloud together to create a truly hybrid cloud.”
Data Sovereignty in the Cloud Era
IT organizations are turning to public cloud to enable their business partners with new services and capacity, but recent revelations have put data privacy, security and sovereignty high on the list of customer concerns. A UK data center helps VMware’s European customers address local data privacy, security and sovereignty issues, while taking advantage of a public cloud from a global leader.
A recent survey of 200 VMware enterprise customers in the UK conducted by Vanson Bourne, an independent and specialist market research provider for the global technology sector, revealed that 86 percent of respondents believe that it is important to ensure their business critical data is stored with a UK-based cloud service provider. In addition, the survey found that 52 percent said that they are required to follow industry data residency regulations and/or compliance standards. Twenty percent were unaware where all of their data, including mission critical data, currently resides.
Delving deeper into existing cloud usage, the survey found that 85 percent of the customers surveyed said that their current public cloud is either not integrated or only partly integrated with their own data center, requiring applications to be recoded to migrate workloads, and 81 percent agreed that they needed a solution that makes their public cloud as easy to manage as their own infrastructure.
“By moving to a single hybrid cloud platform with VMware vCloud Hybrid Service, we’ll be able to treat our private and public clouds as a single entity, moving workloads out into the public cloud when necessary without needing to invest in additional hardware,” said Michael Briggs, Head of IT Service Operations, Cancer Research. “With VMware vCloud Hybrid Service, my IT teams will be able to quickly launch new products and services, investing in either public or private cloud as appropriate.”
