Moving to the ‘Multi-Cloud by Design’ World

More and more organizations are adopting multi-cloud architectures to leverage the best capabilities to support their applications and data, ushering in what industry experts call a multi-cloud as a default environment. That move, however, does not come without challenges – including management and mobility of applications and data.

“There is no one size fits all for multi-cloud. Users use different cloud environments for different reasons, entering this multi-cloud by default world. But there are a lot of challenges our customers are contending with regarding multi-cloud by default,” Jonathan Siegal, senior vice president of Product Marketing for Dell Technologies, said during the Dell Technologies World conference earlier this month.

Users have indicated that their data is too hard to manage and move as it continues to grow and become more dispersed across several platforms. The lack of consistency between cloud environments can result in unpredictable costs, and concerns around security and governance, along with the added challenge of having enough talented people with the right skills to manage it all.

Organizations want a connected, consistent, and secure experience across all these disparate fragmented cloud platforms. That challenge is what Dell Technologies has focused on – helping users move from a multi-cloud by default world to a multi-cloud by design world, Siegal explained.

In a multi-cloud by design world, users can take full advantage of the capabilities in each cloud – accelerating the productivity of developers within their organization, and accelerating the pace of transformation.

At the conference, Dell Technologies showcased its portfolio of software and services to help customers contend with these challenges. From a software perspective, “now more than ever, we’re looking to bring our best-of-breed software capabilities to wherever the customers are,” Siegal said. 

One example of this is Project Alpine, he said. With Project Alpine, customers will be able to purchase storage software as a managed service using existing cloud credits, taking advantage of a consistent storage experience from on-premises to public clouds and easily sharing data across multiple clouds.

“[Project Alpine] is about delivering our flagship file block and object storage software in all the major hyperscalers – AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud – and bringing operational consistency across environments,” Siegal said. “It’s the combination of the software and services together that we’re trying to provide that consistent experience that simple, agile, compliant experience for our customers.”

Another example is Dell Technologies’ APEX Multi-Cloud Data Services which provide file, block, object, and data protection services for simultaneous access to all major public clouds from a single source of data.

In addition to innovating on software and services, the company is also building out an ecosystem of partnerships that helps enable a multi-cloud by design vision for their collective customers.

“Organizations and our customers want to use multi-cloud capabilities. But as they do so, they do not want to take on all the complexity that comes with it,” said Akanksha Mehrotra, vice president of Apex Marketing at Dell Technologies. “As you can imagine, nobody gets to a multi-cloud by default world without using solutions from lots of different vendors. So, no one player is going to solve this on their own.”

Mehrotra explained that Dell Technologies has developed partnerships and solutions with hyperscalers and CloudStack providers. The company is also extending those partnerships into SAS and other areas, and will continue to do so.

“We are building out an ecosystem of partners that will help us enable this vision for our collective customers – multi-cloud by design,” Mehrotra said.