Organizations have embraced the cloud operating model for its agility and efficient service delivery. As a result, public cloud use has expanded rapidly, and organizations have widely adopted cloud principles in dedicated IT environments or private clouds. The result is a multicloud world: almost nine out of 10 IT environments today include a mix of public and private clouds.

Multicloud promises the freedom to choose different capabilities from multiple cloud environments to best meet specific business needs. However, this freedom is often constrained because each cloud environment is in effect a silo (or island) with its own ecosystem of proprietary tools, lacking interoperability and operational consistency between them. This makes it difficult to manage dispersed data and workloads, govern security and compliance, maintain performance, modernize applications and control costs.

Multicloud by design is our vision to help customers unlock the full potential of multicloud without being constrained by siloed ecosystems of proprietary tools and services. Multicloud by design brings management consistency to storing, protecting and securing data in multicloud environments. It extends and optimizes cloud stacks to dedicated IT environments, enabling workloads to run wherever business needs, not where technology constraints dictate. And it helps streamline IT operations by bringing a cloud operating model to dedicated IT environments.

Leverage a Consistent Management Experience from “Ground to Cloud”

Using different management tools to store, protect and secure data across different public clouds and dedicated IT environments can lead to spiraling complexity. Most organizations use more than three public clouds and almost four private clouds, but with each additional cloud environment comes additional complexity.

A multicloud by design approach leverages a ground-to-cloud strategy that brings the same enterprise management tools and user interfaces IT teams are already familiar with to all public cloud environments. This provides management consistency and enhanced data mobility in multicloud environments so organizations can leverage their existing skillsets, spend less time managing data and infrastructure, and retain the ability to spend down existing public cloud commitments.

Extend and Optimize Cloud Stacks from “Cloud to Ground”

Organizations are also looking for consistency when it comes to deploying and running applications. IDC predicts 75% of organizations will favor technology partners who can provide a consistent application deployment experience across cloud, edge and dedicated environments by 2025.¹ This requires providing consistent cloud stacks and Kubernetes orchestration experiences across all these environments.

Multicloud by design supports a cloud-to-ground strategy that extends and optimizes the cloud experience of all major cloud stacks to data center, colocation and edge environments. Application teams can now “build once and deploy anywhere” on the software they prefer in the environment of their choice, and organizations have the freedom to seamlessly run their workloads wherever their business needs dictate, unconstrained by technology.

Bring Cloud Experiences to Dedicated IT Environments

Most organizations still rely on dedicated IT environments because not all workloads or data are suited for the public cloud. But IT leaders want their dedicated environments to be more “cloud-like.” In fact, 46% of organizations plan to invest in technologies that deliver a cloud-like experience for their data centers according to ESG.²

A multicloud by design approach seeks to streamline IT operations by bringing cloud experiences to dedicated IT environments. One way to do this is by moving to an as-a-Service delivery model for dedicated IT infrastructure. This approach can reduce IT workload, speed deployment, cut costs and help manage end-of-life assets securely and sustainably.

Another way to bring the cloud experience to dedicated IT environments is to implement a more cloud-like consumption model. With traditional procurement models, forecasting for future workloads is challenging and can result in over- or under-provisioning, leading to wasted resources or unwanted downtime. Research shows that most organizations would prefer a consumption-based model in which their data center infrastructure is purchased on a pay-per-use basis.³

Multicloud by design brings pay-per-use subscription models to dedicated IT infrastructure to help organizations align costs with actual use. With multicloud by design, organizations can experience the best of both worlds – the agility of public cloud with the control of private cloud.

Take Advantage of a Multicloud Ecosystem

Multicloud is, by definition, multi-vendor. A multicloud by design approach embraces the diversity of the multicloud ecosystem and works to simplify multicloud complexity for customers. At Dell, building open ecosystems is in our DNA, with a long history of supporting open ecosystems that put customers first. We have already partnered with major public clouds, cloud stack vendors and more than 500 other cloud providers globally to provide organizations the freedom to choose to consume the technologies that address their business needs, whether that’s in public cloud environments, on-premises or at the edge.

Unleash the Full Potential of Multicloud

Multicloud by design overcomes the complexities of multicloud, integrating with public cloud providers to simplify operations in a multicloud environment and bringing the agility of the cloud operating model to dedicated IT environments.

Dell APEX is the way we deliver multicloud by design. With APEX, IT organizations can eliminate unnecessary complexity, inefficiency and cost, freeing up their teams to focus on innovation. Dell has a unique position in the data and multicloud era with our multicloud by design approach that leverages – due to our scale, leadership in supply chain, breadth of portfolio and vendor neutrality – multicloud partner ecosystem and global services.

Here’s where you can learn more about Dell APEX.

¹ IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Cloud 2023 Predictions

² Modernization Trends Across Distributed Environments, ESG, 2022

³ Technology Spending Intentions Survey, ESG, 2023