Digital transformation strategies of the past often revolved around one of two possible choices: Move fast in the public cloud or retain control on-premises — typically at the cost of agility, mounting complexity and technical debt. VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 was conceived to redefine what a modern private cloud can be — combining the speed and flexibility of the cloud experience with the performance, governance and cost control enterprises need for on-prem success.

University of Bristol’s Keith Woolley talks with theCUBE about VCF 9.0.

One institution reaping the benefits of next-gen private cloud is the University of Bristol. Leveraging the VCF platform, Bristol has overcome its challenges of IT fragmentation and obsolescence.

“We’ve got the whole back office that every normal business would have,” said Keith Woolley (pictured), chief digital information officer of the University of Bristol. “And then, I have the complication of also being a major R&D organization doing half a billion to a billion pounds of research across the books. I couldn’t do that without having a service that I could flex my resources in. When we looked at our strategy, we thought, ‘How can we bring a technology platform that would allow me to flex across all those areas, but give me also a single pane of glass to be able to actually manage that within?’ And that’s how the journey started down our route to VCF.”

Woolley spoke with theCUBE’s John Furrier and Rebecca Knight at VMware Explore, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how one of the UK’s top five universities reimagined its technology strategy with VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 to deliver flexibility, control and innovation at scale. (* Disclosure below.)

Security, governance and agility sit at the core of VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0

Before its VCF implementation, Bristol’s sprawl was daunting: 172,000 public IP addresses and countless development environments with little oversight. Academics often bypassed IT altogether, buying their own hardware to meet deadlines, according to Woolley.

“The academics actually bought the equipment themselves,” he said. “Now, they can spin it up themselves as though it’s cloud. We can cost-control it because we know where it is. I can secure it because it’s inside our environment, and they can administrate it. I also get all the availability of being able to build this as well with Kubernetes. I can scale out my coding environments and build what I need within containerization. It’s a win-win situation for everybody.”

With VCF, everything runs within a secure, centralized environment. Researchers can self-serve compute resources while IT maintains control and visibility. This shift has not only accelerated research outcomes but also ensured compliance and strengthened the cyber posture.

With cloud adoption surging across higher education, teams like Woolley’s have faced pressure to embrace hyperscalers. But uncontrolled costs and hidden financial overheads made the option unattractive, he noted.

“The development environment we’ve now got is in one place,” Woolley said. “I don’t have unique boxes sitting around a wild estate that I can’t control, I know where everything is right now. My cyber ops and everything else is in one place.”

One of Bristol’s most ambitious initiatives is “borderless education” — the idea that students should be able to access world-class resources from anywhere. VCF underpins this vision, enabling secure global collaboration without sacrificing sovereignty, Woolley added.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMware Explore:

(* Disclosure: Broadcom Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Broadcom nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE