The Cloud Complexity Imperative
By WP BrandStudio
Organizations must unify and simplify the management of their sprawling multi-cloud environments
One of the biggest transformations in IT service delivery over the past decade has been the emergence of the hybrid cloud infrastructure—an IT environment that offers parity across public and private environments. This allows organizations to choose between on-premises or off-premises locations for their workload based on requirements and business needs.
More organizations than ever are investing in public cloud services, like AWS or Microsoft Azure, while at the same time implementing solutions that allow them to modernize their on-premises service delivery so that it can match the scalability, elasticity and self-service nature of public cloud environments for the many workloads that may not be well-suited for public cloud.
IT leaders have many options when deciding where to run IT infrastructure to support their evolving business needs. However, the unintended consequence of leveraging the many options is complexity. 73% of respondents in an Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) survey agree that offloading infrastructure to public cloud service providers on top of continued progress optimizing on-premises environments added complexity to IT operations.
One way for organizations to greatly reduce the impact of multi-cloud complexity is the use of improved systems management solutions—a better way to holistically and efficiently manage all their infrastructure regardless of running workloads in the public cloud, in a private cloud, at the edge, or on-premises. Consolidating cloud management tools to three discrete tools or fewer, which are usable regardless of infrastructure locality, is the optimal way to operate in hyperconverged cloud infrastructure.
With this, organizations stand to reduce costs, security breaches, and application outages while at the same time freeing up an average of 70.5 person-hours per week (or nearly 2 full-time equivalents) in infrastructure management time, improving developer experience and performance, and increasing their pace of innovation.
The benefits of cloud management consistency
IT staff have many competing priorities and performing basic operational tasks on their infrastructure should not be one of them. Consistent cloud management presents an opportunity to minimize the number of management consoles administrators need to use in order to operate their environment. This cuts down on time wasted toggling between tools to manage infrastructure. Additionally, with fewer tools to master, administrators can ramp productivity faster. And by providing staff with fewer tools aligned to their existing skills, organizations can reduce dollars and time tied up in training and consulting services.
Toggling between numerous management consoles also contributes to risk. Ensuring that each cloud environment is configured properly and patched efficiently is a critical step to preventing exploits and data loss as well as minimizing downtime associated with attacks. Consolidating the management of cloud instances to a single interface allows administrators greater visibility and eliminates configuration and patching blind spots.
Increasing consistency is also a positive for development teams. By streamlining public cloud and private cloud infrastructure, organizations allow developers to code for a single environment. This accelerates releases while giving organizations the flexibility to deploy code to either on-premises or public cloud infrastructure based on the application’s requirements and without needing to refactor an application if the desired location changes over time.
Of course, technical benefits in a vacuum are nice. But the true value driver for the IT organization is how those technical benefits manifest themselves as business benefits like revenue, agility and reduced risk.
In the digital economy, data and software are often the enterprise’s secret sauce. This underscores the importance of a modern approach to data storage and protection in general and to hybrid cloud success in particular. Increased agility and operational speed are critical for organizations looking at hybrid cloud infrastructure solutions to grow and support their organization. Those with the most mature hybrid cloud infrastructure organizations complete 57% more of their cloud projects ahead of schedule, and are 2.3x more likely to be confident in their ability to meet hybrid cloud goals.
The expected technology benefits of increased cloud management consistency will also drive agility. Application developers will push code more frequently, releasing new features faster to customers and employees alike. IT operations teams will be freed up from mundane infrastructure break-fix tasks and able to collaborate with their counterparts on more important priorities—from rationalizing application portfolios, through advancing analytics initiatives, to discussing the requirements of the next game-changing application.
And whether getting products into the hands of customers sooner, getting products to market that wouldn’t have existed otherwise, or both, cloud management consistency is expected to dramatically transform organizational innovation.
Ask the experts
For many organizations, rationalizing cloud services in use as well as the native controls to manage them may seem daunting. Organizations would be well served to explore partnerships with cloud solution architects who can help remove the friction from these transformations rather than going it alone. This includes seeking out partners that can implement solutions in both private and public cloud environments, and which deliver openness and choice across public cloud providers rather than proprietary solutions optimized for a single public cloud.
Dell Technologies, VMware, and Intel Corporation are keenly focused on helping organizations achieve their cloud goals with Dell Technologies Cloud. Any technology decision must be made with consideration for the people, processes, and current state of infrastructure. Dell Technologies is focused on meeting organizations where they are and delivering the technology and services solutions necessary to help them architect a winning hybrid cloud IT strategy that builds on existing tools and skill sets to unlock better outcomes.
Dell Technologies Cloud is a set of cloud infrastructure solutions designed to enable a consistent operating model and simplified management across private clouds, public clouds, and edge locations, which reduces the barriers of cloud adoption and provides the ability to let application and business requirements determine where workloads reside. This vision for the Dell Technologies portfolio is based on an understanding of cloud as an operating model and the ambition to become the trusted technology partner for organizations that are looking to reduce the complexity of multiple cloud environments with a consistent hybrid cloud infrastructure and operations layer.
To learn more about how Dell Technologies Cloud can help you, start here.
This content is paid for by an advertiser and published by WP BrandStudio. The Washington Post newsroom was not involved in the creation of this content. Learn more about WP BrandStudio.
