Commissioned: We live in a rich world of cloud services. Inside many companies, innovation engines within different lines of businesses utilize these services to gain instant access to cutting-edge tools, enabling them to work with rapid scalability and high availability. This has unlocked an unprecedented rate of digital transformation in the past several years.
But while this new era of cloud services has brought with it many advantages, it has also presented certain challenges. IT organizations must now grapple with how to manage, govern and rationalize a complex ecosystem that spans across public clouds, on premises, colocation facilities and edge locations. As a result, they may discover the innovation sought by consuming multiple cloud services is stymied by the toil of managing it all. This is what’s known as multicloud by default.
Shifting from multicloud-by-default to multicloud-by-design
There are two key reasons organizations rethink their multicloud approach. The first is to increase security, compliance, and governance. The second reason is to manage costs more effectively.
Many organizations find cloud invoices get complicated. And when you finally add up the cost of your multicloud-by-default estate, you might find the bill is bigger than you expected. In some cases, this has led organizations to repatriate workloads from the public cloud on premises, or to colocation facilities.
For example, 37signals has estimated they will save seven million over five years repatriating workloads onto their own infrastructure. Of course, your mileage will vary but for 37signals, it’s material for their business.
Naturally, there are instances where it doesn’t make sense to move workloads out of public clouds. For example, some organizations use cloud-based AI/ML capabilities that can’t be replicated on premises or simply wouldn’t run there as well. There are also complexities around data gravity and often costs associated with moving data from one location to another.
Every organization is unique; the right solution for you will be based on your unique needs. My advice is to spend time thinking through your workload placement – what should be in the public cloud and what might benefit from being brought back in-house. This is known as a multicloud by design approach and it allows you to unlock all multicloud has to offer without being limited by its complexities.
Embracing multicloud by design through ground-to-cloud and cloud-to-ground strategies
So how can you adopt a multicloud by design strategy? There are two ways to address this problem. The first is to take technologies your organization already uses and run them in the public cloud in a ground-to-cloud approach. This lets your teams use familiar tools in public cloud environments, so you leverage existing skillsets, spend less time managing data and infrastructure and even spend down existing public cloud commitments.
Another way is to bring public cloud stacks to dedicated IT environments in a cloud-to-ground approach. Developers use a lot of cloud-based tools and tool chains. But few organizations are running 100 percent of their workloads in the cloud – most have at least some on premises infrastructure. This means they need solutions that help bridge the divide. Utilizing multicloud appliances that can replicate cloud stacks on premises offers the best of both worlds. You get access to cloud services within your data center or colocation facility and you can seamlessly move data back and forth from the cloud using the same storage technology.
How to bring multicloud by design to your organization
At Dell we make these strategies possible through our Dell APEX portfolio. APEX was designed to simplify the complexities organizations face when it comes to multicloud. This means everything from applying management consistency across multicloud environments, to bringing cloud stacks to dedicated IT environments, to adopting cloud experiences on premises. This helps you move faster, react quicker to challenges and opportunities and ultimately, innovate at scale. Here’s where you can learn more about Dell APEX.
Sponsored by Dell.
