Cloud transformation projects to drive business and technical benefits

Dell Technologies’ mission is to help its customers embrace IT transformation and make them succeed in their digital transformation journey. Those organisations who strive to improve their IT will always have a competitive advantage over others and will also derive better business results. Channel partners have been an integral part of Dell Technologies business and the company puts in a lot of efforts to ensure that they stay up to speed and have the resources they need to grow and reach their end customers. In a chat with VARINDIA, Surajit Sen, Chief of Staff, Modern Data Centre-APJ, Dell Technologies discusses about

Cloud-First to Multi-Cloud Strategy

The data management landscape has changed and rapidly moved from a siloeddatacenter to a multi-cloud world. Now organizations are building their datacenter for not just storing data but also to use it for decision making.

Organizations are adopting multi-cloud strategy as cloud is easy to use and simple. This shift by organizations is not surprising. However, multi-cloud does come with its own set of challenges, one of them being its complexity.

Elaborating on this, Surajitsays, “We understand this and therefore, we launched Dell Technologies Cloud last year. This solves multi-cloud complexity by being the operational hub of a customer’s hybrid cloud, delivering consistent operations and infrastructure, with workload placement flexibility- from edge to core to cloud. It offers an integrated set of software and hardware solutions that can be deployed in a variety of edge locations, core private cloud datacenters - allowing organizations to deploy applications using vSphere-managed virtual machines or Kubernetes managed containers and functions.

Additionally, our solutions allow organizations to have ultimate control over their data and applications,while also reducing overall cloud deployment and management complexity – in order to keep them ahead of the competition.”

Grid cloud

Talking about the upcoming Grid cloud, Surajit says, "Dell Technologies is playing a crucial role in helping organizations build multi-cloud environments, by allowing them to leverage consistent infrastructure and consistent operations across various cloud platforms. This would enable organizations to accelerate their cloud adoption. Grid Cloud is another facet of a multi cloud environment. Dell would be a key enabler for Grid Cloud through it’s industry leading technology and go to market program for Telcos and Service providers.”


Business Model to sustain longer

At present, need for speed from IT and improved security are the major factors for consideration by businesses along with cost. This coupled with the increasing amount of data brought about by mobility, artificial intelligence (AI), analytics, Internet of Things (IoT), edge computing, along with traditional workloads, is driving demand for multi-cloud model.

“Going forward, the market will be in need for more consistent and standardized automated cloud resources to enable developers and line-of-business to execute at speed and in a more cost-effective manner. Therefore, to be future ready, Indian organizationswill aim for a multi-cloud model - where the same ease, simplicity, manageability, auto-provisioning and orchestration can be achieved at a lower cost. Additionally, this will enable them to experience a new way to build and consume IT services while driving innovation and growth,” predicts Surajit.

Benefits ofthe ESG report for the Partners and VAR Community

Explaining the ESG report, Surajit says, “The ESG report, titled ‘The Cloud Complexity Imperative’ provides an understanding of the concept of management simplification for the organizations adopting multi-cloud strategy. ESG’s research shows that more than nine out of ten organizations (91%) work with IT vendors, system integrators, value-added resellers, to help architect and implement cloud infrastructure projects. This research gives inroads to partners/VAR communities to derive maximum benefit out of the cloud for the customers. While cloud transformation projectswill drive dramatic business and technical benefits, organizations would be well served to explore partnerships with cloud solution architects who can help remove the friction from these transformations rather than doing it alone.Additionally, the report does say that only 5% of organisations are experiencing the benefits of cloud, meaning many firms are potentially missing out on supercharging their computing power. Hence, partners must counsel customers to get the most out of their clouds by having management consistency.”

Preparedness for combating the emerging challenges

At present people are working from home due to social distancing and lockdown norms. This has led to an increase in cloud usage. As cloud provides the benefits of scale as per use, organizations are widely adopting cloud services.

He says, “Due to social distancing and lockdown norms, there is a need for organisations to enable their employees to be able to work from home and ensure data security at the same time. With almost all the organizationsallowing their workforce to work remotely,there has been an increase in the cloud usage.Organizations are increasingly adopting cloud services as it provides them the ability to scale as per the need and also provides them with the option of renting computing power. However, in the long run, companies who are dependent on cloud for their businesses will need to opt for cloud services that are cost-efficient.

In fact, our cloud infrastructure solutions helps organisations in removing any complexities which they might face and offers consistent infrastructure while reducing operational costs. Additionally, Dell Technologies has rolled out solutions like Unified Workspace, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and many more - to address the challenges emerging at this time.”


Initiatives taken to help Partners

To help its partners survive this critical time, Dell has come up with various initiatives like financial relief packages along with free training and certifications etc.

“As a part of our commitment towards partners, Dell Technologies recently unveiled financial relief package to help its partners preserve capital and cut costs and help their customers. The financial relief package, together with free training and certifications, will help Dell Technologies’ partners improve cash position and build stronger capabilities for the future. Additionally, we have also rolled out Working Capital Solutions (WCS) Programme and Dell Financial Services (DFS) which will help partners plan and strategize for the future to support their customers,” elaborates Surajit.