LAS VEGAS – Enterprises need to shift how they think about and deploy networking and security services, especially in a multi-cloud context, VMware Networking VP Ambika Kapur said during Gartner's IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference.

"We really believe that the cloud operating model is super important, but it requires embracing a scale-out architecture – you cannot get there with a scale-up architecture. You have to do what the hyperscalers have done for themselves, and we are enabling you to do that," Kapur said.

The vendor's NSX networking and security platform, for example, delivers networking and security features needed to automate compute, storage, networking, and security so enterprises can reach a true cloud operating model.

Kapur cited the virtualization giant's acquisitions of Avi Networks and Carbon Black as the foundation for its NSX load balancer software, advanced threat prevention capabilities with layer-7 controls, and "clever" integrations with Carbon Black and vSphere. "This has become pretty central to the ransomware defense that most of the customers are deploying," she said.

And these solutions have seen "really strong market momentum" because the cloud operating model is "just common sense, right? Who wouldn't want it?" Kapur said. She described VMware's take on the model as "being able to deploy a workload with a single click," including DNS, firewalls, and advanced load balancing.

While Kapur sees enterprises making significant progress toward a cloud operating model, developers still often need to open a ticket to configure a firewall, she said. "Instead of one click or 30 minutes to deploy a workload, it still takes 30 days or more to get a workload deployed. And that is not automation. That is not the cloud operating model."

What's holding enterprises back? According to Kapur, the problem is hardware load balancers and hardware firewalls that, despite being built for a different era, are universally loved. "They work extremely well and that is part of the challenge. That's what makes change hard. You're familiar with them. We know how they work. They're high performance. They're extremely reliable."

But that doesn't mean they fit within the cloud operating model. Hardware firewalls, for example, don't "scale out," they "scale up." To make firewalls run faster, an enterprise either buys bigger boxes or more of them. It's typical to have "six to eight really expensive boxes running at 15% utilization, waiting for some magical event to happen when they'll go up all the way to 100% utilization," but that's not "what the hyperscalers are doing," Kapur said.

She recommends organizations imagine the stacks of network devices running in the data center have been defined as software, broken into thousands of mini stacks, and spread throughout the data center. "Every web server [and] every application server gets its own stack, so with this architecture now, your data center starts to look very different," Kapur said.