Infrastructure delivery is progressively moving to a cloud-native model. However, uncertainties caused by VMware licensing changes are adding a new urgency to strategic decision making. We consider the challenges in moving to a cloud-native infrastructure and the role that Azure VMware Solution might play in the journey.
For more than two decades, enterprise IT has been built around the data centre. For much of that time the default computing model has been server virtualisation, typically with VMware vSphere. This abstracted the physical hardware to improve utilisation and created a a stable, controllable environment. Infrastructure teams optimised for uptime, capacity planning, and cost efficiency.
And it’s a model that has worked very well… but the focus is shifting.
Competitive pressures now demand faster application delivery, greater elasticity, API-driven integration, and continuous iteration. The objective is no longer simply ‘efficiency’, it’s business agility. Which means cloud platforms, platform services, API-driven architecture, containers, and DevOps operating models.
However, many organisations can’t simply switch to cloud native.
Cloud Native challenges
While a cloud-native architecture promises resilience, scalability and speed, organisations need to first overcome several challenges.
- Reliance on legacy applications
If key systems are monolithic, tightly coupled to specific OS versions, and/or dependent on infrastructure-level configurations, they can’t quickly or easily be refactored.
- Skills gap
Typically, existing staff don’t have the skills or the working culture to support a cloud native approach. They’ll need time to become skilled with infrastructure as code, continuous integration, development and deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, and new security models, as well as to adapt to a product-centric delivery culture.
- Risk
Core systems, such as ERP and finance, can’t tolerate disruption – especially in regulated environments. ‘Big bang’ changes are inherently riskier, and it may be a level of risk that isn’t acceptable to your senior leadership team.
- Commercial realities
Speed of change may also be limited by hardware investment cycles or data centre contracts, multi-year licensing commitments, and data residency requirements.
Hybrid by necessity: the transitional phase
Where a rapid move to Cloud Native isn’t practical, a more measured, incremental transition is possible.
Organisations can adopt a hybrid model and separate infrastructure migration from application modernisation, moving workloads off ageing infrastructure and stabilising first before evolving.
It is important to distinguish here between cloud location and your cloud operating model. Running workloads in a public cloud doesn’t automatically make them Cloud Native, but it can create the conditions for modernisation.
Which is where Azure VMware Solution (AVS) can help.
What is Azure VMware Solution?
You can think of AVS as a half-way house on your journey from a data centre centric to cloud-native infrastructure.
AVS gives you a fully managed VMware environment running natively within Microsoft Azure. It provides a dedicated, private cloud infrastructure built on the familiar VMware stack — vSphere, vSAN and NSX — delivered as a Microsoft service. Operationally, it looks and behaves like the VMware environment many organisations already run.
Crucially, workloads can be migrated with minimal or no re-architecture. Existing tools, processes and skillsets remain relevant.
In simple terms: AVS allows organisations to relocate their VMware estate into Azure without rewriting applications.
AVS as a strategic bridge
Azure VMware Solution is not an end state, but it provides an easy to manage route to Cloud Native.
1. Reducing infrastructure risk
AVS enables workloads to be quickly moved into Azure, reducing your reliance on physical infrastructure without introducing immediate application risk. It separates the infrastructure decision from the application decision. This is especially important for organisations facing data centre exits, hardware refresh cycles, or cost pressures.
2. Buying time for modernisation
By lifting and shifting VMware workloads into Azure, you can then assess applications individually. Some may be retired, others may be re-platformed, and a smaller subset may justify full re-architecture. The key is sequencing. Infrastructure migration first, application transformation second.
3. Supporting skills transition
AVS also buys you the time and space to make a controlled transition, allowing your infrastructure team to continue to operate in a familiar way, while gradually integrating Azure-native services and developing new, cloud-native skillsets.
4. Enabling gradual integration with Azure services
Once workloads reside within Azure, they can begin consuming native services such as backup, disaster recovery (DR), security tooling, networking, analytics, and eventually platform services.
AVS becomes more than a hosting platform: it becomes a staging post for transformation.
When AVS makes sense and when it doesn’t
AVS is particularly compelling where:
- There’s an infrastructure deadline: data centre contract renewal or hardware refresh
- There’s a sizeable VMware dependency
- VMware licensing changes have impacted budgets and altered economics
- Application refactoring would take years
- Risk tolerance is low
- There are regulatory or resilience drivers.
It is less compelling where:
- Applications are already containerised
- Cloud-native delivery capabilities are mature
- Greenfield platforms are being built from scratch.
Discover what’s right for you
While an immediate cloud-native transformation is an attractive notion, practical challenges may dictate otherwise. Many organisations will pragmatically follow a path from virtualised data centre to hybrid infrastructure, cloud-hosted VMware, incremental re-platforming, and targeted cloud-native adoption.
AVS can play a deliberate role in that journey, as an enabling platform that reduces risk, protects operational continuity, and creates breathing space for transformation.
But, like any architectural decision, individual circumstances matter.
What’s next
Further your knowledge by registering to attend ‘Navigating the path from AVS to Cloud Native’ on Monday 23 March at The Shard, London. At this punchy, half-day briefing you’ll hear:
- Microsoft’s Ron Goedhart explaining The Foundation for Content Modernisation
- Aspen Insurance’s Head of Cloud, Julianne Franz outline learnings from their cloud-native journey
- Microsoft’s Nelson Pereira describing the value you can drive with Data Factory
- Cloud Direct’s Jonathan Moore outline the help that can accelerate your journey
Unable to attend? Request an introductory call with a subject matter expert using the form below, and see how Cloud Direct can help you successfully prepare for cloud-native infrastructure.
