The most effective transition to a cloud computing approach enables organizations to yield the following benefits:

Efficiency Through Utilization and Automation

In addition to the known cost savings, cloud computing and the VMware approach deliver lower total cost of ownership (TCO) by minimizing unnecessary IT infrastructure investments, providing efficient management and maintenance tools, and preventing technology lock-in. They help IT to adopt a more cost-effective, self-managed, dynamically optimized environment for the most efficient delivery of IT services. They provide additional flexibility by developing and deploying applications that can run in the datacenter or at a cloud service provider. With this cloud computing approach, organizations move toward an infrastructure that uses policy-driven management and automation to monitor itself, self-optimizing for load and demand on the applications, based on usage.

Agility with Control

The VMware cloud computing approach also dramatically simplifies IT services provisioning and deployment, so IT organizations can respond more quickly to business needs. At the same time, it allows IT staff to implement policies consistent with business and governance requirements, providing the control IT needs to minimize business and regulatory risk. An effective cloud strategy also means ensuring security and eliminating the need to constantly reconfigure static security infrastructure for this dynamic computing environment. Cloud computing allows IT organizations to maintain full control over the availability, reliability, scalability, security and service level agreements (SLAs) for all workloads.

Freedom of Choice

With the VMware cloud computing approach, organizations gain the flexibility to retain existing operating system and application stacks, yet deploy them internally or externally with any VMware vCloud™ service provider. IT staff can continue to support traditional systems, while removing many of the headaches associated with them—system porting, security patches and more. They can also gain more predictable performance. Cloud computing delivers more freedom to users without sacrificing IT staff control. End users can consume IT services from traditional applications, onsite cloud applications and external service provider offerings, and have rapid access to their data anytime, anywhere. Meanwhile, VMware end-user computing solutions provide freedom to manage access to applications and services by policies across platforms and devices.