Forrester rates virtual machine infrastructure ‘stale or risky’ Analyst firm Forrester Research has published its 2023 planning guide for Technology Architecture and Delivery and warned that IT departments will face increased spending scrutiny as economic conditions tighten. “Unlike the response to the pandemic, which demanded huge investments in the tech underpinning new delivery models, …
"... configuration management databases, because they all improve efficiency".
ONLY if these are kept up-to-date and with the correct information in them. And in my experience, that doesn't happen often enough. CMDBs are usually out of date and incomplete. Decisions made on such data is subsequently flawed and takes an age to sift through (you have to assume all data is incorrect until proven otherwise). Some of the CMDB automation tools extract garbage with their default config, and also need attention to ensure that that doesn't happen.
And yes, some PHBs are using virtualisation to avoid upgrading old and out-of-date infrastructure. I've seen it on more than one occasion.
“Enterprises must turn once again to outsourcing as a means to increase efficiency and lower costs,”
Can I have a large dose of whatever the author was on when they came up with that nugget?
Surely that should be “Enterprises must turn once again to outsourcing as a means to give an impression of lowering costs,”
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Agreed.
I'd add that listening to self serving analysts or advice never ends well.
In the recent past we had a vendor tell us we should to be moving away from our obsolete data center infrastructure into their cloud. This was from a vendor rep who had never set foot inside said data centers.
We are using cloud services but only where it makes sense. Our data centers aren't obsolete either.
So outsourcers can then hike prices as they like. We're right now seeing what relying too much on a supplier for gas is meaning. Let's give a very few cloud providers the same power - they won't ever think to use it to fatten their revenues...
Use the cloud for what it does best - but don't put all your eggs in one basket....
Outsourcing decreases some costs, and increases some others, when you are speaking of infrastructure or support.
If you are not careful enough you discover fast that the increases trump the decreases...
but since they these costs don't usually come from the same budgets, someone will always be able to proclaim a "win" (and pocket a bonus).
And I won't even speak of the other cost of "lost time" because the new outsourced IT team doesn't have the same SLA as the previous internal one (and not the same motivation to provide a proper level of service).
You can't take analysts opinions as gospel, those that do should be beaten. I love a bit of public cloud as much as the next man, but it has to be appropriate in the use case and be fully thought through. Talk of K8S in the article also reminds me of that XKCD strip about the use of buzz words. Just because you say it doesn't make it the silver bullet.
Finally, as for VMware not innovating as much once Broadcom take them over. Don't make me laugh, they haven't innovated in years. Like Apple, they just keep rehashing existing features and claiming "further and faster" every time.
Are they in Gartner's Magic Quadrant? Because we only listen to firms that are squarely in the Magic Quadrant...doesn't matter which Magic Quadrant, just has to be a Magic Quadrant.
“Enterprises must turn once again to outsourcing as a means to increase efficiency and lower costs,”
Great advice - hand off parts of your IT to people who have no skin in the game. Haven't we already been down this rabbit hole a couple of times in the past 20 years? It never turns out as well as it does in the slide deck.
... and indeed I may be wrong.
It seems to me (as a professed amateur and dilettante) that:
1. Cloud instances usually are VMs. If so, how can you tout the Cloud while denigrating VMs?
2. Yes, VMs have a large attack surface, so security indeed could be a significant concern. But has this manifested itself in recent years?
3. Not all software, internally or externally developed, has been containerized, and these constitute a rather large library of applications in many or most commercial settings, and so VMs seem like an excellent solution to keeping them running.
I just can’t take a recommendation from anyone, even Forrester, seriously if they are recommending outsourcing. I used to work for a software vendor in professional services, and have seen probably a dozen companies outsource to places like IBM, Cognizant, etc., and the whole process is almost always poorly executed. I’ve seen a few of them turn around and pull IT back in-house as soon as those contracts ended.
I do however think that this Broadcom acquisition will force an exodus of workloads off of VMware to three different platform types - public clouds (especially for easily re-factored applications), open source on prem virtualization environments like KVM, and onto competent but less popular commercial virtualization platforms like Hyper-V and Nutanix’s Acropolis Hypervisor. Broadcom is the single worst company that I’ve ever had to do business with, and I think lots of other decision makers would agree with me.
Microsoft is clearly trying to phase out Hyper-V in favour of Azure Stack HCI - which is very similar, but only works with hyperconverged instrastructure and - this being Microsoft - is fully integrated into their cloudy management system and has monthly licensing costs per core.
Moving to plain Hyper-V now is not something I would consider now, despite uncertainties around VMWare.
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