10.30.19
VMware, Inc., in conjunction with VMworld 2019 Europe, today highlighted how EMEA customers News UK, ClickSoftware, Discovery, and StepStone are using CloudHealth by VMware and VMware Secure State to unleash the cloud’s full potential for agility, growth, and innovation, and to better address common multi-cloud challenges related to cost, scale, security, and visibility.
A majority of organizations are on a multi-cloud journey, and increasingly customers are bringing together investments in multiple public cloud providers, with a unified hybrid cloud environment to execute a single cloud strategy to support the needs of applications. CloudHealth enables customers to manage, operate and better secure their multi-cloud environments. With CloudHealth, customers collaborate across lines of business to make intelligent decisions related to cost management, security, and governance while scaling their multi-cloud environments. VMware Secure State is an intelligent multi-cloud security platform that helps organizations identify public cloud misconfigurations, visualize at-risk infrastructure, correlate cross-cloud threat activity, and automate security and compliance reporting across teams. Together, these cloud services are enabling VMware to build a model where customers can deploy, run, manage, connect, and better protect any app on any cloud.
“Our customers sit at the cutting edge of innovation in the cloud,” said Tom Axbey, vice president and general manager, CloudHealth by VMware. “As they build out their cloud centers of excellence and redefine what’s possible, VMware is acting as a trusted partner helping in the ongoing success of their businesses. VMware is helping the next generation of cloud leaders to not be derailed by the complexities of the cloud, but rather empowered with speed, a more informed cloud management and security strategy, and rapid business decision making.”
News UK Manages Spend, Enforces Centralized Governance
News UK publishes Britain’s best-selling and best-known newspapers, including The Sun and The Times, and acquired Wireless in 2016, which includes one of the world’s biggest sports radio station talkSPORT and Virgin Radio UK. To keep pace with the ever-changing media landscape, News UK said it runs all of its digital properties in the cloud, allowing the company to easily scale up in order to meet demand.
“Cloud complexity can present a major challenge if you don’t know how to address it,” said Iain Caldwell, Head of Infrastructure, News UK and News Corp EMEA. “Tracking and managing change across our environment, while enabling innovation across the business, is complex. What CloudHealth delivers in terms of optimization is key, as is giving finance visibility of spend.”
How News UK tackled this challenge – enforcing centralized governance with CloudHealth – and the company’s learnings will be covered in a session at VMworld entitled, “Migrate Your Business to the Cloud and Keep Your Expenses on the Ground.”
Visibility Enables ClickSoftware to Maintain Business Momentum
ClickSoftware, a leading provider of workforce management solutions on a global scale, provides solutions that are used by major brands including Ericsson, National Grid, Orange, and Liberty Mutual. With field service management offerings that are trusted by large enterprises, the company said it relies on the cloud to help customers deploy its SaaS solution quickly and easily. The challenge, however, was that ClickSoftware needed a way to keep cost in check and maintain visibility as the company’s cloud adoption steadily increased. CloudHealth — with its cost governance and automation capabilities, customizable dashboards and integrated reporting — was the perfect solution.
“CloudHealth has an intuitive interface, which gives us a full view into all our assets,” said Eran Sharon, Cloud Services Program Manager, ClickSoftware. “We saw value very quickly, within the first few weeks, and have since used it to put policies and alerts in place that delivered immediate benefits, even beyond cost savings. Striking that balance of speed with control is exactly what you want in a cloud program, if your business is going to continue to be a market leader.”
Global Growth Spurs Focus on Security at Discovery
Discovery is a financial services company headquartered in South Africa that operates in the healthcare, life assurance, short-term insurance, savings and investment, and wellness industries. It is pioneering a business model which incentivizes people to be healthier, while enhancing and protecting their well-being. The company’s unique approach has created substantial new business growth, according to the company, manifesting in its globally recognized Vitality shared-value insurance model, currently active in 22 countries with over 10 million members. Discovery said it embraced the public cloud to scale globally and maintaining the agility and speed for which the development team is known.
“We release products every year yet run a fairly lean cloud security and operations team. The ‘fail fast’ mentality of the cloud certainly fits our operating model,” said Johan Marais, Virtualization Manager, Discovery. “At the same time, we need to be available to our customers whenever they need us and make sure we aren’t introducing additional risk into our environment. From a technology standpoint, that means adopting solutions that simplify visibility and scale quickly to match our growing infrastructure complexity. VMware Secure State gives us real-time insight into our security posture and automates reporting, so we can proactively manage misconfigurations, threats, and compliance risks.”
StepStone Optimizes Cost Across Brands
StepStone is a global online job board business consisting of over 10 top brands. It is part of Axel Springer Digital Classifieds GmbH, allowing customers to find new employees in more than 135 countries and matching candidates with more than 600,000 jobs per month. The company said its cloud usage has steadily increased since the initial migration of their production infrastructure, and today they use CloudHealth to forecast spend and identify underutilized assets.
“With visibility into spend by environment, team, and brand, CloudHealth has enabled us to drive a culture of accountability and innovation,” said Tristan Greaves, Group AWS Programme Manager, StepStone. “The reports give teams a consolidated view into their assets so they can drill down as needed. With multiple teams across multiple countries, that’s a lifesaver for me, my team, and the business.”
