VMware intends to make life easier for vSphere users with its recently announced Project Arctic — a cloud-connected management console for on-premises services. It initially will focus on disaster recovery (DR) and ransomware protection use cases while ushering in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) version of vSphere.

Project Arctic is a tech preview that VMware introduced during VMWorld last year. It natively integrates cloud connectivity into vSphere and allows users to access Cross-Cloud services through vCenter. VMware Cross-Cloud is a set of integrated services that allow customers to build, run, and secure applications across any cloud.

“We are looking at that base as the customers and seeing how can we actually bring cloud services, cloud connect, cloud capacity to those customers in a much easier fashion,” Paul Turner, VP of product management for vSphere, told SDxCentral.

The project will offer an option to have a cloud-managed console with a set of free services while allowing users to see all of their on-premise instances and select cloud services to add to those instances as needed. This will give customers a unified view of their IT environment across multiple data centers, Turner said.

“It's just expected now in products that you use cloud-management consoles to help customers manage across on prem and cloud,” he said, adding that Cisco switches also have cloud-managed consoles. But “they have not gone as far as we have here to bring in a set of extended cloud services.”

One of the top capabilities that vSphere customers would like is an easy-to-use, cloud-protected disaster recovery service that helps them quickly recover from critical system failures, Turner said. 

While VMware already offers disaster recovery and ransomware protection services — the most recent being Carbon Black Cloud Managed Detection and Response — users want something easier, according to Turner.

Users “have to go through extra hoops to be able to deploy the DR service,” he explained. “What Project Arctic is doing is taking some of these services that are highly valuable to customers and just making them much easier to use and to consume.”

Additionally, “75% of vSphere customers do not have a DR strategy right now,” VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram told analysts at a recent investor conference. “Project Arctic will make that dramatically easier. That’s a massive value proposition.”

Project Arctic also makes it easier to recover from ransomware attacks. If an attack happens, the service returns vSphere environments to their pre-attack state, Turner said.

Additionally, the cloud-managed console lets customers monitor all of their existing deployments for security risks and threats. “Arctic is all about making it easy to bring these cloud services to disconnected customers and do it in a secure way,” he added.

Project Arctic also advances VMware's subscription and SaaS goals. 

“We intend to move all of our products with cloud-delivered value and subscription, SaaS offering” in 2022, Raghuram said at the Jefferies Software Summit. “Our strategy as we have done with end-user computing will be that as customer adoption of a subscription and SaaS happens, then we would gradually just offer only a subscription, SaaS offering over time.”

VMware plans to move vSphere customers to a subscription model “as part of moving into the Arctic cloud-connected service,” Turner explained. 

It gives users the flexibility to grow and reduce their capacities in the cloud or/and on prem, and decide where to deploy the capacities, he added.

Project Arctic is currently in the initial access phase testing with 30 customers.

VMware didn’t disclose when an Arctic-based product will be generally available, but Raghuram previously told analysts that his company is targeting the first half of 2022.