Is your cloud strategy working? Why multicloud by design is the way forward.

With the rise of cloud computing, many organizations rapidly adopted public cloud services alongside cloud principles in dedicated IT environments, or private clouds, to accelerate innovation and meet business requirements. This led to the rise of multicloud: today, almost nine out of 10 IT environments include a mix of public and private clouds¹.

In some instances, organizations undertook a thoughtful and planned approach to their multicloud strategies. But in many cases, organizations found themselves in this multicloud world by happenstance—new solutions and services were rapidly onboarded, each with its own ecosystem of proprietary tools, lacking interoperability and operational consistency. Many found these environments difficult to manage, govern and modernize, all while controlling costs. All these challenges limited the benefits the multicloud model was supposed to unlock.

What is multicloud by design?

There’s another way to approach the challenge of the multicloud operating model. To truly take advantage of the promise of multicloud, organizations must adopt a multicloud-by-design strategy.

Multicloud by design is an approach that applies consistency to storing, protecting and securing data in multicloud environments. It extends and optimizes cloud stacks to dedicated IT environments, so organizations can run workloads where and how they want. And it helps streamline IT operations by bringing a cloud operating model to dedicated IT environments. This unlocks the full potential of multicloud for organizations without constraining them to siloed ecosystems and proprietary tools and services.

What does multicloud by design look like in practice?

As it turns out, most organizations use an average of two or more public clouds and nearly three private clouds², and many of them use multiple management tools to store, protect and secure data across these environments. The complexity adds up fast.

One way organizations can reduce complexity is by extending management tools and user interfaces their IT teams already use to public cloud environments. This ground-to-cloud approach provides management consistency and enhanced data mobility in multicloud environments and helps them make full use of existing skillsets. That way they can spend less time managing data and infrastructure and they can spend down existing public cloud commitments.

Another approach is to extend all the richness of major cloud stacks to environments outside the public cloud. IDC predicts by 2025, 75% of organizations will favor technology partners who can provide a consistent application deployment experience across cloud, edge and dedicated environments³. A true multicloud-by-design strategy empowers organizations to pick the cloud stack and environment for the outcome they want to achieve, and organizations will increasingly want to work with vendor-neutral partners that give them a wide range of cloud stacks and the freedom to choose the right options for their needs.

A third approach is to streamline IT operations by adapting on-premises environments to be more “cloud-like”. This can be done in multiple ways. For example, organizations may embrace an as-a-service delivery model, which reduces IT workload and speeds deployment. Or they may simply implement cloud-like consumption models, which can reduce under- or overprovisioning and unplanned downtime.

Where to start with your multicloud-by-design strategy

Multicloud has the potential to help organizations increase innovation, improve resilience and reliability, reduce risk of lock-in and optimize costs. But to realize these benefits, organizations need to take a thoughtful approach and deeply consider how to reduce complexity and manage across multiple environments. This is the key to unlocking multicloud by design.

At Dell, we help organizations achieve their multicloud-by-design strategies through a wide variety of product offerings and our Dell APEX portfolio of services. This means extending enterprise class storage software in public clouds, partnering with leading public clouds and cloud stack vendors and helping organizations embrace the cloud everywhere. Dell has a unique position in the data and multicloud era due to our scale, supply chain leadership, breadth of portfolio and vendor neutrality.

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

[1] HashiCorp 2022 State of Cloud Strategy Survey

[2] Flexera 2021 State of the Cloud Report 

[3] IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Cloud 2023 Predictions