VMware : It’s here! VMware Cloud on AWS now available in South Africa

Customers across South Africa can now take a bold step towards their hybrid and multicloud future with the announcement of the immediate local general availability of VMware Cloud (VMC) on AWS in South Africa. Built on a partnership established in 2016 - VMC on AWS is the quickest, safest, and easiest way to extend private cloud vSphere workloads to AWS Cloud.

Now you can be assured of where your workloads reside, meet local data compliance and sovereignty needs, and extend your multicloud goals with peace of mind. And you can join a growing list of customers across industries and geographies who are using this service for cloud migration, data centre extension from an on-premises environment to the cloud, disaster recovery, application modernisation and virtual desktop infrastructure in the cloud. As mentioned in this Forrester paper, our customers have also enjoyed a significant impact in terms of lowered TCO, faster migration, lower operational costs and improved ROI.

Know Exactly Where Your Workloads Are

With the addition of VMC to the local (Cape Town-based) AWS data centre, you can forego the heavy lifting usually associated with manually configured and self-managed and maintained solutions with a packaged service for your vSphere workloads. Further, you can take advantage of best-of-breed support and maintenance directly from VMware and AWS - all while knowing exactly where your workloads reside.

VMC on AWS allows you to leverage the same familiar VMware tools, skill sets, and governance across your on-premises and cloud environments while benefitting from AWS cloud economics and sustainability commitments. With access to over 200 AWS services, you can modernise your applications, unlock the value of your data, and innovate faster with cloud technologies like containers, serverless, computing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

In short, it is a managed service that combines compute, network, and storage capabilities in a fully supported, ready-to-run service from the creators of the software, VMware and the leading public cloud provider, AWS.

We are both deeply committed to the continuous development of the offering, and you can find the latest status of features and release updates for VMware Cloud on AWS here and refer to the release notes VMware Cloud on AWS release notes.

Meet Local Data Compliance and Sovereignty Needs

VMC on AWS brings our enterprise-class Software-Defined Data Centre software to AWS bare-metal infrastructure, perfect for running enterprise workloads more securely at scale across both virtual machines and containers.

It also features built-in Kubernetes and optimised access to 200+ native AWS services, including data, analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. With built-in VMware NSX security capabilities, you can stop security threats that move laterally within and across cloud and data centre environments.

You will immediately benefit from the ability to:

• Accelerate cloud transformation with operational consistency and flexibility
• Reduce costs while scaling global business demand
• Meet local data compliance and sovereignty requirements with locally hosted workloads
• Modernise workloads and increase innovation with cloud-native services
• Embrace energy-efficient, sustainable solutions

For a quick overview you can view the VMware Cloud on AWS: Overview and watch informative demos, overview videos, webinars and hear from our customers at VMware Cloud on AWS on YouTube. Alternatively, you can download the VMware Cloud on AWS Solution Brief and VMware Cloud on AWS TCO 1-pager.

Tap Into Local Resources, Leverage Local & Global Skills

As a result of the extensive partnership between VMware and AWS, as a customer, you have access to dedicated sales, technical guides, solutions architects, and customer success teams and an extended partner network to help you navigate a move to VMC on AWS. Visit our new VMware Cloud on AWS Techzone for curated technical documentation.

Today, AWS is a VMware preferred public cloud partner for all vSphere-based workloads, and VMware Cloud on AWS can be purchased from both VMware and AWS and the companies' respective partner networks in South Africa. In addition, VMware enables strategic partners in South Africa to grow their hybrid cloud skills and capabilities on VMware Cloud on AWS through the VMware Partner Connect program.

The even better news is that today there are more than 300 validated technology solutions available to customers for use in VMware Cloud on AWS environments.

For more information related to VMware Cloud on AWS, you can follow us on Twitter @vmwarecloudaws and give us a shout with #VMWonAWS, read our latest VMware Cloud on AWS blogs or listen to latest episodes of VMware Cloud on AWS Unplugged Podcast.

Contact your local VMware team, Mark Reynolds on [e-mail] or Mehdi Mkacher [e-mail] to ask about how you can embrace the hybrid cloud with VMware Cloud on AWS!