Six ways to build, run, manage and protect all applications
By Ahmed Auda, Managing
Director, METNA, VMware
Organisations are in the midst of an
application explosion. Irrespective of sector or audience, they are being
defined by how fast they can deliver modernised apps and services that
differentiate their business and enhance the user experience. There are, in
essence, six steps that enterprises should take to create the ideal environment
to master the app explosion transforming their businesses.
- Completely
secure – no matter where an application is deployed. In a
world where applications and data exist as much outside the corporate network as
they do within it, that means a new approach to security, one where it is
intrinsically built in and not bolted on. Modern-day security requires an investment shift away from trying to prevent breaches
at all costs and towards building intrinsic security into everything – the
application, the network, essentially everything that connects and carries
data.
- Consistent management of
applications, regardless of where they’re deployed. To
remove the need for specific skills, IT needs to be able to manage applications
across different types of cloud, from data center, to public, to the edge. This
needs to be agile, efficient and automated to ensure that IT teams can run
applications and their environments in a consistent manner. Having this ability
means having
the visibility, operations, automation, security and governance to
manage and operate their systems and apps, even across
multiple cloud environments.
- Ensure
applications are portable from cloud to cloud without refactoring.
There are multiple ways to move applications across developer platforms,
without costly refactoring – from re-platforming
to adopting a multi-tier approach, which sees the application split (for
instance, with a front-end in a public cloud, and the data kept on-premises),
to building cloud-native applications from scratch, or deploying a
software-as-a-service version. The key to all of these is having consistency
across operations and infrastructure.
- One
set of tools, for one set of environments –
dovetailing with consistent management, having one set of tools, on a common
platform, to build and manage the entire application portfolio across all
environments removes the need for vendor or cloud specific teams, reduces
complexity – and provides the necessary visibility required across multiple
environments.
- Promoting collaboration
between developers and operations – Developers need access to the tools and
environments that are going to help them do their jobs. Operations teams are
looking for a straight way to manage – continual changes are the stuff of
operations nightmares. The risk is that if operations and developers cannot
collaborate, then the latter will acquire their resources outside of the
enterprise IT structure, leading to potential security risks. With applications
so critical to business success, getting developers and operations on the same
page is now an absolute imperative.
- Empower developers to
build and deploy applications to any public cloud – Users want
experiences rapidly, and the delivery of the applications and services
providing those interactions needs to match that pace. To deliver that,
developers need a common platform that means they can build applications
anywhere and then deploy them in any environments. Kubernetes is clearly the
preferred platform, delivering the operation of an elastic web server framework
for cloud applications. 81% of
respondents wanted IT operations to provide developer-ready Kubernetes,
including cluster infrastructure and Kubernetes lifecycle management.
