Why It’s Time to Bring Your Public Clouds Down to Earth

Like most IT leaders today, you find yourself grappling with a paradox.

Your IT estate has the potential to afford developer teams more flexibility and agility to place workloads across on-premises systems, public and private clouds, colocation facilities and edge networks. 

Yet as your environment swells and sprawls your teams are struggling to corral the variety of homegrown and vendor-operated systems you’ve accumulated through normal business operations. Not to mention the systems supporting workloads deployed as a result of fulfilling ad-hoc requests from various business lines.

Hiring enough talent to manage those disparate systems is difficult in the best of job markets. 

Moreover, IT organizations everywhere face increasingly complex and siloed multicloud ecosystems, with pressure to move more quickly and improve efficiency in the face of skills gaps and economic headwinds.

The multicloud morass

Today roughly 85% of businesses are using two or more cloud platforms, while 25% are using as many as five, according to Deloitte Insights. 

Indeed, while multicloud environments offer plenty of options, simplicity remains elusive.

Developing applications and workloads is more challenging due to the variety of tools, some homegrown, some proprietary, that make these systems so rich.

The result? Your diverse IT estate confounds the teams that manage it, making it difficult to get developers the tools they need to write needle-moving applications and innovate to better serve employees and customers.

Part of the problem is your multicloud workloads are designed in and for specific vendor locations and include disparate tooling, standards and geographic operations.

For instance, while you may enjoy the flexibility of running Kubernetes orchestration software and containerized applications in public clouds, moving them tends to be too difficult or risky.

Or perhaps you decide one day to migrate analytics, AI or ML workloads from a public cloud to on-premises, because it might afford you better performance and lower latency because you’re not sharing resources with co-tenants.

Some apps just better protect the business running within the four walls of your datacenter due to compliance, cybersecurity and governance rules.

Even if you have enough IT staff to operate such siloes, bridging them can crimp your ability to meet digital transformation objectives, as change management across people, process and technology consistently rank among the top obstacles.

The value prop of cloud-to-ground

What if you could take the simplicity, agility and technology features associated with public cloud environments and enable your developers to access them in your on-premises, colo or edge environments?

This can help your software developers, who prefer self-service access to their programming and other tools, write needle-moving applications for business stakeholders and customers.

And it would allow you to run workloads wherever your business needs—without technology limitations.

Emerging capabilities, known as cloud-to-ground technology, can help alleviate these challenges.

For instance, cloud-to-ground solutions enable you to run cloud stacks and Kubernetes clusters on-premises so that you can give developers easy access to their favorite cloud services while allowing them to write once and run anywhere.

Such solutions marry the do-it-yourself agility and freedom of choice developers enjoy from public cloud with the security and control of the on-premises systems with which they are already familiar and comfortable consuming. This approach helps developers focus on building their applications without worrying about their infrastructure.

That is why we at Dell are introducing APEX Cloud Platforms for Microsoft Azure, Red Hat OpenShift and VMware.

Each of these solutions affords developers access to their preferred cloud services with the security, performance and control of an on-premises solution.

These cloud platforms bolster support for a multicloud-by-design approach that optimizes public cloud operations and brings the agility of the cloud operating model to any IT environment, while offering greater control over applications and data.

That way businesses can focus on accelerating innovation and achieving business outcomes that align directly with their digital transformation goals.

Because managing IT should be about delivering business technology quickly and efficiently rather than reconciling paradoxes.

Learn more about our portfolio of cloud experiences delivering simplicity, agility and control as-a-service: Dell Technologies APEX.