Broadcom commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study to examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying VMware Cloud Foundation Operations.¹ This abstract will focus on how organizations can use VMware Cloud Foundation Operations to modernize their infrastructure, applications, and security, and the value the solution delivers to their IT teams and internal customers.

For this abstract, Forrester conducted interviews with seven representatives from organizations using VMware Cloud Foundation Operations:

• Infrastructure engineer at an insurance organization that operates in North America.

• IT infrastructure and security manager at a chemical organization that operates globally.

• Infrastructure administrator and engineer at an aviation organization that operates globally.

• Lead IT architecture analyst at a healthcare organization that operates in North America.

• DevOps cloud engineering manager at an insurance organization that operates in North America.

• Infrastructure lead at a financial services organization that operates in North America.

• Senior director of engineering at an insurance organization that operates globally.

The interviewees said VMware Cloud Foundation Operations helped their organizations gain end-to-end visibility across their virtual and physical infrastructures and that this increased visibility allows their customers to be more efficient in monitoring, optimizing, and securing infrastructure across cloud environments. They also explained that VMware Cloud Foundation Operations decreased the manual processes typically involved when managing and scaling an organization’s infrastructure, facilitating activities such as application discovery, workload migration, troubleshooting, and infrastructure segmentation planning.

Interviewees said that prior to using VMware Cloud Foundation Operations, their organizations struggled to understand how various parts of their infrastructures were “talking” to one another, which made segmentation planning and firewall rule creation difficult. They also said gaining this type of infrastructure visibility demanded many hours of work and, even after much time and effort, it often yielded questionably accurate results. Troubleshooting infrastructure issues was also a challenge since it was difficult to pinpoint where a given issue was occurring within the infrastructure.

The interviewees explained that after the investment in VMware Cloud Foundation Operations, their organizations improved their infrastructure visibility overall —  including visibility on VMware Cloud Foundation, edge, and hyperscale cloud environments — which helped them become proactive in consolidating and streamlining their infrastructures. Notable improvements in time to resolution and troubleshooting were identified as key benefits of VMware Cloud Foundation Operations.

Moreover, they said the solution’s capabilities directly supported their organizations’ objectives across three key modernization use cases:

• Infrastructure modernization: Accelerating private cloud deployment; optimizing infrastructure and operations; and extending the data center to edge, public, and sovereign clouds.

• Application modernization: Enabling self-service infrastructure and cloud services for application teams while improving the build, run, and management of Kubernetes, modern applications, and private AI workloads.

• Security modernization: Strengthening compliance, hardening infrastructure, bolstering lateral security and intrusion detection, and accelerating recovery from ransomware or other disasters.

The interviewees explained that VMware Cloud Foundation Operations helped their organizations increase infrastructure mapping efficiencies, decrease infrastructure outages, reduce time spent monitoring infrastructures, and improve troubleshooting.

Investment Drivers For Infrastructure, Application, And Security Modernization

Before adopting VMware Cloud Foundation infrastructure Operations, the interviewees’ organizations struggled with several challenges across the three use cases:

Application And Infrastructure Modernization. Interviewees said that in their organizations’ prior environments, developers lacked full visibility of their application and infrastructure environments. With the increasingly dynamic application landscape, interviewed decision-makers said their organizations needed a platform that would give administrators a better view of application boundaries and dependencies because this would help them plan and prepare for workload migrations and other projects. An infrastructure administrator and engineer from an aviation company described the original challenge: “The biggest pain point for us is physical-to-virtual interfacing. Our infrastructure is pretty huge worldwide, especially when you layer on our virtual component. We needed a tool that could bridge that gap and provide visibility there.”

The infrastructure lead in financial services described the challenges their organization’s DevOps team faced while trying to understand cluster utilization: “We didn’t have a proper way of understanding how much clusters were getting used, the downtime, and how many clusters were free so we could allocate them. This lack of visibility made it difficult to plan capacity effectively, often resulting in delays for development teams waiting on infrastructure resources.”

Security Modernization. Interviewees explained that security planning was another key challenge they had before implementing VMware Cloud Foundation Operations and that developers struggled to maintain compliance and enforce security policies manually. Without an infrastructure monitoring tool in place, especially one with segmentation capabilities, developers struggled to outline which virtual machines (VMs) made up an application and how certain devices communicated with other devices and parts of the infrastructure. The organizations wanted a tool that would allow them to proactively address security concerns by automatically recommending policies to stay ahead of any issues.

The DevOps cloud engineering manager in the insurance industry highlighted the impact of VMware Cloud Foundation Operations on their organization’s infrastructure: “VMware Cloud Foundation has definitely has helped in the overall mean time to detect response and troubleshoot these incidents because we know it’s coming from that single pane of view and then we know how things are working in the background. This has really helped with compliance efforts.”

Key Results For Infrastructure, Application, And Security Modernization With VMware Cloud Foundation Operations

The results of the investment for the interviewees’ organizations include:

• Accelerating infrastructure modernization and VM deployment. Interviewees said using VMware Cloud Foundation Operations dashboards improved their organizations’ visibility into their data sources and that it’s a centralized, easy-to-use interface for laying out the foundation for infrastructure monitoring activities. They also noted this benefit significantly impacted ROI and helped their organizations quickly lay the foundation for their infrastructure monitoring activities, representing a massive improvement to their prior processes. The infrastructure lead at a financial services organization explained: “We didn’t have a centralized view … so we don’t know which cluster is free and how many CPUs (central processing units) we can give to team X, which is building a new application for us. Now, instead of guessing or waiting, we know exactly what’s available and can support our developers in real time. That’s a huge leap in agility and efficiency.”
  The infrastructure engineer at an insurance organization highlighted: “To have had to manually go through and work with all of these developers to map out the flows or understand how to use firewall logs … I can’t even begin to imagine how many hundreds of hours per month that we would’ve been putting into that if not for [VMware Cloud Foundation Operations].”

• Enabling application modernization through self-service and workflow automation. Interviewees said their organizations reduced the time needed to monitor infrastructure after implementing and performing flow mapping with VMware Cloud Foundation Operations, and they described commonly using application discovery and segmentation capabilities in VMware Cloud Foundation Operations to define infrastructure policies and firewall rules. The newly added policies helped improve infrastructure security and boost performance. An IT infrastructure and security manager from a chemical company said: “[VMware Cloud Foundation Operations] has a very smart app discovery method where it can parse out from the name of the machine and what application and what tier it is. So in the places we ran that, we’re now able to tier our applications. And if a new server gets spun up in the web tier, for example, it automatically gets brought into that tier in the application discovery consult, and we’re able to classify.”
  The infrastructure lead in financial services explained how [VMware Cloud Foundation] enabled their organization to proactively identify potential issues (e.g., resource constraints, load imbalances): “Everything is automated now, and we exactly know where the capacities for every data center [are]. … The infrastructure team can tell us before if anything that needs to [be addressed].”

• Decreasing infrastructure outages. Interviewees talked about how VMware Cloud Foundation Operations improved their organizations’ infrastructure performance, in some cases helping to reduce infrastructure issues by 50% within data center infrastructure fabrics and between VMs in the virtual infrastructure, such as communication between two VMs on the same server. An infrastructure administrator and engineer from an aviation company described the following use case: “Prior to [using VMware Cloud Foundation Operations], there were outages that were improperly tagged. Sometimes things were tagged as physical outages when really, they were virtual outages, and vice versa. So, not only does the platform help us to get to the right domain more quickly, but it also helps to accurately reflect where the outages are happening so that we can direct our spending to mitigate future outages.”
  The DevOps cloud engineering manager at an insurance organization said there was a measurable improvement in system uptime with VMware Cloud Foundation: “Our overall availability improved by 10%. … We now have fewer incidents and outages and glitches versus a year ago.”

• Improving troubleshooting. The tediousness and frustration of performing infrastructure troubleshooting was a common cause of irritation among the interviewees, who said they appreciate how much easier it is to collect information with VMware Cloud Foundation Operations and how much faster they could solve problems. The infrastructure engineer from the insurance company summarized a typical troubleshooting experience with VMware Cloud Foundation Operations: “I was once pulled in late in the game on an incident where one of our most critical applications was just not working. A team of about 20 of our developers and operations engineers had been trying to figure it out for 6 to 7 hours. So, I popped my head into the room and said, ‘Hey give me this information.’ Within 15 minutes, I could identify exactly where the problem was, and then I had it fixed within the hour.”

The DevOps cloud engineering manager at an insurance organization highlighted the impact of VMware Cloud Foundation Operations centralized observability and telemetry tools: “We know where to go, what to look for, how to troubleshoot, and how to fix it. It’s all coming through that single pane of view with VMware Cloud Foundation, so we’re not wasting time chasing down logs or trying to correlate data across platforms.”