Why it’s time to put your stake in a ground-to-cloud strategy

With spring creeping closer to summer, warm weather camping season is in full swing. Fans of communing with nature know that a successful camping trip requires critical planning and preparation.

Whether you’re mulling a weekend trek along a stretch over the Appalachian Trail or a week’s sojourn deep in the wilds of Yellowstone National Park, bringing the right equipment and tools is paramount.

Foundational to your camping checklist: Tents, sleeping bags and key survival tools such as good hiking boots, reliable light sources and cooking gear. You’ll also pack for the potential for inclement weather and other contingencies. Rain ponchos, extra clothes and other protective accoutrements are essential.

Such preparation requires meticulous, intentional attention to detail.

Computing can be like camping

As it happens, architecting for modern computing environments can feel a bit like planning a challenging camping trip—risky and adventurous. Because computing environments have gotten a lot more complicated as organizations pursue digital transformations.

Asset accumulation from mergers and acquisitions, as well as workloads rapidly built to satisfy business needs, have spurred an increase in public and private clouds, on-premises systems, colocation facilities and edge environments. As a result, developers have many location options on which to run their software workloads.

And IT departments are moving their applications in many directions—for many reasons. Fifty-three percent of IT decision makers polled in an internal Dell survey reported considering moving workloads from public clouds to other locations¹, while 45% reported mulled moving workloads from datacenters to other locations. Security, strategy and cost were among the top reasons for migrating workloads.

And just as campers must pick the best equipment to ensure a successful trip, developers seek the best tools with which to build, test and launch their applications.

Unfortunately, the proliferation of so many computing environments—essentially, a multicloud-by-default—means IT must work with disparate tools, as well as security and networking protocols. Corralling these siloes across multiple operating models is akin to pitching your tent in the rain; you can do it if you must, but it isn’t easy.

And while a wealth of options is great for campers, it can be overwhelming for IT departments managing so many platforms.

As an IT leader, you know providing a sound foundation complemented by the right tools is necessary to achieve return-on-investment goals and other key metrics. Fostering a multicloud-by-design approach will help organizations bring consistency to managing these multicloud environments.

Ideally, this will make your digital transformation trek go more smoothly—and help you and your team avoid getting lost in the woods.

But how? How do you reconcile disparate cloud operating environments when your IT department is already resource constrained and inundated with priority punch lists?

Putting a stake in the ground (to the cloud)

One option for helping you maximize simplicity, agility and control includes running software developed for on-premises environments in public clouds.

What’s the value in this approach? Remember, managing multiple clouds presents lots of technical and operational challenges, largely because of their native tooling.

You can bring order to the chaos and help simplify operations by running the block and file storage software your IT teams already run on-premises in public clouds. Ideally, this will enable developers and their IT peers to run apps written for on-premises environments in public clouds they may have been using—or intending to use—anyway.

For example, some traditional applications tend to be difficult to migrate to the public cloud. By integrating on-premises infrastructure with the public cloud you can access scalability and flexibility without refactoring or migrating those apps.

Also, organizations can enable larger databases supporting critical applications to burst in the public cloud, scaling based on business demand. So, developers get the performance boost they need to run their workloads while leveraging IT’s existing infrastructure investments. 

The ground-to-cloud option can provide more operational consistency, while enabling your teams to benefit from the features, functionality and performance with which they are accustomed.

Our Dell APEX portfolio of as-a-Service solutions provides such optionality in a cloud experience. The APEX ground-to-cloud offers include Dell APEX Block Storage for AWS, Dell APEX File Storage for AWS and Dell APEX Block Storage for Microsoft Azure. These solutions help boost your data mobility while enabling you to manage your environment more consistently, so you can spend less time blocking and tackling infrastructure.

You know better than anyone that wrangling multicloud environments can feel like pushing a boulder up a mountain. But you don’t have to stumble on your way up. As with camping, proper preparation for operating multicloud environments—an approach that provides more options while streamlining management—is critical.

Isn’t it time to put your stake in the ground-to-cloud strategy?

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

1 Dell Internal Survey, April 2022