Report: AWS is the winner as VMware Workloads move to cloud The vast majority of businesses that run VMware environments plan to move at least some of their environments to the cloud by next-year. Nearly half of them will use Amazon Web Services (AWS). Druva, a provider cloud data protection solutions, found that this is the conclusion of a recent survey. For its 2017 VMware Cloud Migration Survey, Druva polled 443 VMware professionals and found that 90% of them expect to have VMware environments in the cloud by 2018. Nearly half (48%) of those surveyed cited AWS as their preferred platform to move to. Microsoft Azure was cited by 25 percent of respondents as the second-most popular cloud platform. Druva says that VMware’s partnership with AWS is a key factor in the widespread shift to the cloud. The two companies announced a joint initiative last October to offer VMware solutions on AWS as part of a new offering called “VMware Cloud On AWS”. According to some reports, the two companies are also working on a separate project that would allow enterprises to run AWS from their private datacenters. This would put AWS and VMware in direct competition with Microsoft and its Azure Stack offering. According to the report, “Since October 2016, when VMware announced its partnership (with Amazon Web Services)), organizations have been looking at the cloud to provide consistent functionality while enabling Cloud workload mobility with products such as vMotion so application resources can stay where they make most sense for their business.” Organizations want to take advantage of the cloud and still use the skills of their existing VMware administrators. The cloud is a great option to manage VMware environment workloads. Consider the impact downtime and poor application performance can have on user productivity. Despite the appeal of the cloud, most organizations will continue to keep some workloads on-premises. In fact, over three quarters (78%) of respondents to the survey said they intend to use a hybrid approach. Other findings from the survey:

Disaster recovery applications were the most popular among those who have started their cloud migrations. They accounted for 31 percent.
Nearly two-thirds (63%) of respondents said they are thinking about re-architecting applications for the cloud. According to the report, “There is a growing desire for cloud-based applications to augment the VMware environments on public clouds platforms” as a result of the increasing complexity and number of data centers.
Just over a third (38%) of respondents cited cost as a major reason for migrating their workloads to cloud computing. Druva stated that cost was not a major factor in the decision of a large portion of survey respondents. “Our survey shows that such migrations result from a strong business need.”