By Marc O’Regan, CTO for EMEA at Dell Technologies
It’s a multicloud world with Irish organisations making investments across private and public environments. A steady stream of new capabilities and tools are demonstrating the power of cloud computing as they spin up at the edge to manage the massive influx of data generated in real time.
Some 83% of organisations that use public cloud today have a multi-cloud strategy that may include on-premises or collocated data centres, multiple public clouds, and the Edge.
Now, more clouds are rolling in. From telecom to sovereign clouds, these latest clouds are providing support, applications and requirements specific to healthcare, finance, government, retail and even media industries.
While a multicloud approach provides organisations with a variety of benefits, including increased flexibility, it also introduces enormous complexity. The proliferation of these very specialised clouds can create yet another silo across business if organisations aren’t able to move data and apps freely between them.
For Irish business leaders, it’s essential to have a robust multicloud strategy that ensures organisations benefit from the efficiencies of public clouds, like flexibility and scale and bring these on-premises with the advantages of performance, control and security.
Less is more…complexity
When building a strategy, some may say the obvious answer is a singular cloud approach – pick one platform with one provider, rely on their apps and small pool of partners.
But this stunts innovation. Closed platforms decrease integration across the ecosystem and lead to vendor lock-in. While it may seem simple in the beginning, organisations miss out in the long run by limiting themselves to one set of services that impact their ability to easily access and adopt future industry innovations.
Too often, organisations that do invest across multiple clouds and services are left to figure out the various processes on their own. Workarounds take time and resources away from innovation and productivity. According to IDC, two-thirds of organisations (66%) want to deal with fewer, more strategic digital infrastructure and cloud vendors, while 68% are investing in ways that avoid vendor lock-in.
Organisations want these clouds, apps, platforms and services to work together seamlessly. They want multicloud by design, not by default. But they don’t necessarily want a single service provider – they want a simpler way to manage and orchestrate data and apps across multiple cloud environments. While the ideal scenario is to get a singular view, a more realistic goal may be to reduce the number of unique siloed tools for cloud management and orchestration to enhance value.
More open, less ego
We see the solution to multicloud complexity differently: break down silos and build an open ecosystem that thrives on a wide range of partnerships, collaboration and innovation.
Multicloud is not just a random collection of public clouds or even those clouds’ loose connections to private clouds. Multicloud is about accessing an ever-expanding set of innovations across clouds and acknowledging that you need the capabilities of the entire ecosystem to deliver modern IT.
That’s where open ecosystems come in. They allow for interoperability and deeper integration across solutions and services – providing greater access to innovation from a variety of providers. This way, the technology not only works, but it also works in the ways that organisations across Ireland really need it to. It has to if we want to unleash data-driven breakthroughs through AI and automation powered by cloud computing.
No single company or innovator will deliver on the promise of technology. Nor should they. That’s what makes the technology industry so incredibly vibrant – relentless innovation that pushes the boundaries of possibilities to solve the world’s greatest challenges.
At Dell Technologies, we’re helping businesses and organisations across Ireland with their multicloud challenges on the journey. With our APEX as-a-Service offering, we can deliver a cloud experience to customers wherever they want it, enabling businesses to stay agile so they can align technology with business needs to scale up and down as their business evolves. With secure and consistent infrastructure across both private and public clouds, customers can reduce operational costs and drive the right outcomes for their people and their organisation.
To find out more about Dell’s Apex services for multicloud, visit: https://www.dell.com/en-ie/dt/learn/cloud/multi-cloud.htm
