VMware customers have experienced some frustration around cloud migrations for quite some time. While VMware has attempted to provide a path to the cloud through their vCloud strategy, substantial barriers have made the migration difficult to achieve. While VMware customers have achieved substantial cost and efficiency savings through VMware technologies, they have largely not been able to extend these benefit through cloud migrations. The new IBM and VMware partnership is changing this.

There are two aspects of the partnership that make this very different than other cloud offerings for VMware:

• IBM will create dedicated cloud resources for VMware customers who migrate, essentially creating a private cloud platform. This will alleviate many of the concerns of Enterprise customers about the security of their cloud migration.

• IBM has negotiated great pricing for VMware applications on the IBM SoftLayer cloud. This will let VMware customers experience an immediate ROI on the cloud migration.

VMware customers have invested a great deal in the architecture and administration of their VMware environments. VMware applications let customers create secure segmented networks, apply security and access controls, monitor the status of their applications, automate business recovery operations, and perform an number of other administrative functions in a coherent and cost-effective manner. Finding a way to the cloud that leverages benefits is crucial for the VMware customer.

I think IBM has found the right path for these customers.

IBM is not the first to attempt to address the needs of the VMware customer. Rackspace and others have cloud migration plans and have been working with VMware customers. But I think IBM SoftLayer has solved some problems that will open the path to VMware in the cloud.

One of the remaining challenges for VMware customers is to get their third-party application and security vendors to embrace this move to the cloud. While the IBM VMware offering is a true native VMware implementation that will reduce the technical issues, software vendors need to be explicit about their support for solutions deployed on a cloud platform. VMware customers can find it confusing and frustrating to get clear statements of support from vendors.

At Townsend Security we are trying to support our customers migrating our products in VMware to the IBM SoftLayer cloud. Our Alliance Key Manager and related encryption products are already validated for deployment in VMware. And we’ve extended our support for the VMware platform by validating our encryption and key management to the PCI Data Security Standard. We now also support the migration or deployment of our solutions in the IBM SoftLayer cloud. This gives IBM SoftLayer customers the confidence of moving their encryption security infrastructure to the IBM SoftLayer platform.

It has been amazing how the PCI-DSS validation of our solutions in VMware have helped VMware customers meet PCI requirements. VMware deserves a lot of credit for creating a formal program for PCI validation on a well-defined VMware reference architecture. Working with Coalfire, a security auditing firm, we were able to very quickly certify our encryption and key management solutions to the PCI-DSS standard. This has helped multiple customers quickly move through the compliance challenge and this applies to the IBM SoftLayer platform, too. Because IBM SoftLayer retains the dedicated resources for the customer, compliance will be easy to achieve.

IBM and VMware have created a great path to the cloud for VMware customers. I know that many challenges will remain for customers with more complex VMware architectures, especially with hybrid environments. But I think the path to the cloud just got a bit straighter and easier.

Patrick