IT professionals in Thailand who hold a common belief they will lose control over security, cost, and systems when they move to the cloud, no longer have cause for such concerns when they adopt VMC on AWS.
Many local enterprises are accustomed to running their IT infrastructure in an on-premise environment, where all components including hardware, operating systems, network, and applications are run from the ground up and remain under their control.
In sticking to what they are familiar with, however, Thai businesses are failing to realise they are shouldering numerous costs associated with hardware maintenance, service downtime, data centre rental, and utility consumption.
They also are hindered by the limitations of owning systems that need to be replaced at the end of their lifecycle as well as other hardware procurement processes. This will impact their market agility and ability to respond quickly to changing consumer demands.
And when companies do move to the cloud, often, their lack of knowledge about the architectural design and operations associated with native cloud environments, have led to added costs rather than savings when compared to their on-prem deployment.
According to a 2019 study by Boston Consulting Group and AWS, a lack of expertise has made it more difficult for Asia-Pacific companies to work with their cloud providers. Businesses may not understand typical cloud spending or budget norms, and the complexity of managing a cloud environment can prove a challenge, finds the study, which includes respondents in Thailand, Singapore, and Indonesia.
Security awareness also has created uncertainty, with some companies unaware of the security capabilities offered by their cloud providers. Due to cybersecurity concerns, 45% say they do not host specific data on the public cloud, the report reveals.
Realise true cloud potential with VMC on AWS
Such worries and the lack of in-house expertise have led many organisations in Thailand to believe cloud will not bring about significant cost savings and can result in a loss of control over their IT infrastructure, explains Somchai Kittichaikoonkit, Acting Managing Director, CS LoxInfo Public Company Limited.
"They don't realise that choosing the right cloud solution, like VMC on AWS, can address all of these concerns and offer a myriad of tools to help them easily manage their cloud costs and security," Kittichaikoonkit says.
With VMC on AWS, for instance, they have the flexibility to build their VMs based on what the workload requires. They also can provision a new SDDC (software-defined data centre) stack with direct network access to popular native AWS services, such as Amazon S3 or Amazon EC2. The close proximity of these services allows developers to integrate them into their applications without any additional bandwidth.
Workloads also can be moved quickly and securely to VMC on AWS, without any major change in their architecture. With VMware's integrated migration tool, VMware HCX, customers can experience seamless and secure migration between vSphere 5.0+ environments on-prem and VMware Cloud on AWS. For specific workload needs, customers also can roll out large-scale live migration with zero downtime.
"This offers a key advantage for CIOs who want to avoid any major impact on their workload design as they begin their cloud migration," Kittichaikoonkit adds.
In addition, all VMC clusters come equipped with data encryption at rest using XTS-AES-256, and all keys for this encryption is directly managed by AWS. Such security features will only be available to customers running native cloud platforms when they fork out additional fees to implement them.
"Being part of the VMware stack, VMC on AWS also offers a degree of extensibility for VMware's suite of products such as VMware Site Recovery Manager [for disaster recovery], vRealize suite [for monitoring and automation] and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid [for container platform]," Kittichaikoonkit says. "For native public cloud to have similar capabilities, you'll likely have to seek out separate third-party solutions and these may come with their own integration issues."
To further ensure their cloud deployment delivers on the cost benefits and agility they look for, Thai organisations should watch out for these common pitfalls:
- Companies often get "locked in" when moving to a public cloud due to the costs of refactoring your applications when you switch to another platform. Ensure your workloads are portable by running on VMware, which can be migrated seamlessly to any other VMware platform.
- Deploying proprietary technologies can make it harder to move to another cloud platform. Choosing a cloud solution such as VMC on AWS not only ensures you're not tied to any native public cloud, but also enables you to move your VMware workloads to any of VMware's other public cloud partners, including Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
Kittichaikoonkit adds: "Any concerns about hidden cloud costs can be easily resolved with VMC on AWS, which offers a straightforward charging model that is designed to help businesses better manage their budget for cloud utilisation."
Furthermore, he notes that CS LoxInfo PLC. operates nine data centres across Thailand and has the infrastructure as well as expertise, which includes an engineering team armed with deep VMC on AWS skillsets, to help Thai businesses with their cloud migration journey.
Contact a CS LoxInfo PLC. representative to find out how VMC on AWS can address all your concerns about moving to the cloud.
