Take legacy VMware estates directly into Azure – White Paper

The public sector is looking afresh at digital transformation from the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic. Its response showed it is possible to develop and deploy new digital services in days or weeks rather than months or years, often by utilising the flexibility of cloud services.

This has changed perspectives, with many believing this pace and ability should become the norm rather than the response to an emergency. There is a strong feeling that local and regional authorities and the NHS in particular have learned plenty of positive lessons that should contribute to their ongoing digital transformations. It is also affecting priorities for the supporting infrastructure, with less attention to on-premise data centres and more on the utilisation of cloud platforms.

But this comes with some stiff challenges, often in moving legacy applications designed to work on an in-house infrastructure to the cloud, and in replicating the benefits of virtualisation in that environment. These are complex tasks that can raise unexpected problems, and they need an infrastructure that includes tools to support the transition and provide a foundation for future service development.

This is where Microsoft’s new Azure VMware Solution (AVS) comes in to its own. It has been created specifically as a mechanism for taking workloads virtualised on VMware technology on to the Microsoft Azure cloud platform – combining the benefits of both and laying the ground for further steps in transformation.

This paper examines the factors behind its development and how it can support public authorities in their transformation journeys today.