Challenges in APAC’s Multicloud Adoption Journey
Organisations in Asia Pacific (APAC) are looking at multicloud solutions to help them navigate IT management complexity, digital skills gaps, and limited data and application visibility. After all, an effective multicloud framework offers greater platform and service flexibility by leveraging the strengths of multiple cloud environments to drive business agility and innovation. It can also improve business continuity and disaster recovery and help avoid vendor lock-in.
However, a multicloud—usually multi-vendor—model is inherently complex to operate. Each cloud is a silo of specific, often proprietary services and tools. The difficulty is aggravated by APAC’s persistent shortage of tech talent. Foundry’s 2023 Cloud Computing Study found that 96% of APAC IT decision-makers reported significant hurdles to implementing cloud strategies, pointing to a lack of cloud management and security expertise and related skills as their top challenge.
Even businesses that manage to successfully adopt a multicloud approach are often unable to unlock the full potential of their investment. The complexity of multiple environments gives rise to multiple challenges from limited control and visibility to inconsistencies in security and compliance. These challenges often hinder the very innovation they were meant to unlock.
In 2023, APAC IT leaders find themselves in need of better cloud management capabilities (55%) and better cost management capabilities (41%) from their cloud services providers, in order to truly realise the potential of multicloud solutions.
Multicloud by Design: Making Multicloud Simple
Many organisations ended up using multicloud by adopting various cloud platforms in a piecemeal manner which can lead to a siloed and complex IT environment.
In comparison, a multicloud-by-design model helps overcome the challenges that may arise while operating a multicloud environment. It offers a unified cloud experience while retaining the flexibility to run workloads separately, optimised for the preferred environment. This approach brings widely used enterprise management tools and user interfaces to public cloud environments, enabling consistency of management and smoother data mobility.
In addition to the public cloud, many businesses continue to maintain dedicated environments for specific workloads. Multicloud by design extends the agility of the public cloud to these dedicated IT environments, enabling flexible service delivery while optimising the cloud experience to data centre, colocation, and edge environments. Therefore, the framework enables IT teams to build applications on any software and in any environment, then deploy those across the multicloud environments seamlessly.
The Dell APEX ground-to-cloud approach brings best-of-breed software from on-premises infrastructure to the public cloud, allowing IT teams to continue working efficiently with familiar, trusted software. Complementing this is its cloud-to-ground approach, which concurrently extends the cloud and container orchestration ecosystems to on-premises environments, allowing cloud-native applications to run on-premises to meet security and compliance requirements. Together, Dell APEX enables data and workload mobility and operational consistency across environments for seamless management.
Dell APEX also features a comprehensive full-stack as-a-Service portfolio to bring the agility, scalability, and rapid deployment of infrastructure, platform, and solutions as services, with its pay-per-use subscriptions an ideal way to enhance cost management and optimise CAPEX for businesses.
Users can expect the Dell APEX as-a-Service portfolio to simplify infrastructure management, reduce workloads, cut costs, and ensure secure asset management. It offers global compute, storage, data protection, and client device as-a-Service solutions, enabling cloud adjacency, multicloud connectivity, and a full suite of hosting, outsourcing, and application management services through Dell and its global partners. Pay-per-use subscriptions reduce costs by aligning capacity with actual use, eliminating over-provisioning expenses, and offering elastic scaling within a buffer at a consistent rate with no overage fees.
Dell APEX Cloud Platforms: Unlocking the Business Value of Multicloud
For Dell Technologies, multicloud by design is about providing choice, consistency, and control across environments. Dell APEX Cloud Platforms, utilising Intel’s 4th Generation Xeon® processors, combine the agility and flexibility of the cloud, with ease of management and operation across the whole IT environment.
Featuring Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel® SGX), 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors can help enable confidential computing across multiple clouds and edges, improving the isolation of sensitive data with hardware-based memory protections. This allows organisations to streamline multicloud with consistent underlying architecture across all clouds with Intel’s high-performance compute and virtualization technology, making it possible to migrate workloads between on-premises and cloud infrastructure.
“The Dell APEX portfolio of modern cloud and consumption experience offerings bring a cloud operating model to devices, apps, and data,” said Karolis Macionis, Regional Director, APEX, Dell Technologies, Asia Pacific and Japan. “Dell APEX Cloud Platforms enable organisations to seamlessly optimise their cloud ecosystem and adopt a cloud smart approach to run their workloads with a focus on effectively supporting their business needs. Moreover, the solutions enable customers to extend and optimise cloud deployments with the ecosystem of their choice, be it Microsoft Azure, Red Hat OpenShift, or VMware vSphere.”
Janet George, Corporate Vice President and General Manager, Cloud and Enterprise Solutions Group, Intel, added how a common underlying hardware and software infrastructure provides portability so workloads can be placed wherever it makes the most sense for the business.
“This makes it easier and more cost-effective to manage workloads over their lifecycle while maintaining agility. Companies can trust the latest generation of Dell PowerEdge servers with 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® processors are a great foundation to build upon,” George added.
The Business Value of Dell Technologies APEX Multicloud and As-a-Service Solutions whitepaper by IDC further found that organisations deploying Dell APEX solutions reported 39% lower cost of operations, while IT infrastructure teams were able to operate 38% more efficiently with the streamlined management systems and could deploy new IT resources up to 60% faster. By enabling their people to focus on what matters, the respondents achieved 12% faster development lifecycles and consistently higher net revenues.
Contact a Dell Technologies representative to understand how Dell APEX can unlock the potential of multicloud for your organisation.
