From a lack of agility to the costs associated with maintenance, relying on legacy systems or standard public clouds can negatively impact your ability to compete. Thankfully, there is a solution.

In this post, we’ll talk about how virtualizing the data plane across private and public clouds  provides businesses with agility, stability and cost-savings. We’ll also pinpoint the specific benefits you can anticipate as a result of adopting a virtualized data plane.

Data Plane Virtualization

If you’re looking for an easy, cost-efficient way to move mission-critical data between public and private clouds as needed, data plane virtualization is your best bet. A virtualized data plane is abstracted from hardware and effectively sits atop your preferred cloud provider, enabling your business-critical data and data services to be completely decoupled from the IaaS underneath. Data plane virtualization provides you with built-in mobility between your private and public clouds.

The Cost Benefits of Data Plane Virtualization

Businesses that opt to leverage data plane virtualization by packaging their data into virtual constructs — data pods  — can enable a number of benefits, including:

  • Meeting cost reduction targets and improving profitability: By discontinuing your use of legacy systems and transforming your critical apps into data pods, you’ll be able to enjoy significant cost savings. Not having to pay specialized full-time employees to maintain your legacy infrastructure and only paying for the cloud capacity and/or performance you need will have an overall positive impact on your bottom line and your profitability. Predictable, easy-to-scale and simple-to-understand pricing, gives you full cost control over your application data.
  • Increasing productivity and innovation: Another benefit of the transformation is that your business is freed up to focus on initiatives and strategies that really matter. Because you don’t have to allocate time, money and resources on keeping your legacy system running, you’re instead able to focus efforts on innovation and the roadmap for future improvements. In essence, you’re able to get back to the business of your business.
  • Enjoying faster time to market: Speaking of innovation, your move away from legacy systems will have a significant (and positive!) impact on how quickly you’re able to get products and services to market. You’ll be more agile, able to more quickly build and deliver new lines-of-business to take advantage of market trends, in a way that is extremely cost-effective.
  • Experiencing unparalleled flexibility to switch vendors: With data plane virtualization, you’ll have the agility to move your applications between clouds, regardless of their underlying operating system. Because you’re able to completely avoid the need to refactor your data, you’re saving money. And because it works on all of the major public and private clouds, you won’t get locked in with a specific vendor and subjected to their product roadmap and pricing increases.
  • Optimizing your spend and cost structure: In legacy buying models, your business is forced to predict—and buy—all of the hardware and software you anticipate needing for the next 3-5 years at one time. Not only is this model expensive but with technology degradation and the reality of buying something that goes unused for years, stranded resources are a real risk.

The decoupled approach of data plane virtualization allows you to purchase technology as it becomes necessary, and flexible licensing means you can virtually allocate resources wherever and whenever needed. This pay-as-you-go model helps improve your utilization while making your costs more predictable.

Multiple Benefits in One Platform

As it’s easy to see, a data plane virtualization platform offers a number of benefits in terms of saving money, improving productivity, and becoming more agile. But what does your business need in order to reap all of data plane virtualization’s benefits? We’ll cover that in our next blog post.