Help wanted: IT tools and talent for building a multicloud estate

Anyone who works in the culinary arts, construction or other trades can vouch for the value of multipurpose tools and the wherewithal to use them.

Give a seasoned chef professional-grade knives, cast iron and carbon steel cookware and there’s little that he or she cannot accomplish in the kitchen. Experienced construction workers handle many tasks with hammers, saws, screwdrivers and other utilities.

When it comes to managing IT infrastructure, IT teams are like trade workers. Staff rely on purpose-built tech tools to stand up new systems, build secure networks with Zero Trust principles and learn how to work with new cloud services, among other tasks.

Building the multicloud estate

Technical blocking and tackling have become more challenging as organizations accommodate new workloads.

As these workloads move outside of or between traditional datacenters, public and private clouds and colos, organizations are juggling an unprecedented sprawl of applications and data. Eighty-five percent of businesses are using two or more cloud platforms and 25% are using as many as five, according to Harvard Business Review.

There’s also this: IT leaders may realize that some of those workloads are running sub-optimally and could operate more efficiently and cost-effectively in another location.

No doubt it’s a lot for IT teams to handle. Yet business lines expect their digital services to always be available with minimal latency. They must just work—like the software they use to order coffee and other consumer goods from their smartphones.

Certainly, wrangling the workload spaghetti has gotten more complex and costly, but it doesn’t need to remain that way. With an intentional, multicloud-by-design strategy, organizations can consistently manage how they store, protect and secure data in their IT estates.

To do this effectively, IT leaders require the right tools and talent. Just as trade workers depend on versatile tools to complete manual work, IT leaders need to build up multipurpose IT muscles.

They must take a flexible approach to executing IT. What do these tools look like? And who will use them?

Cultivating talent and capabilities

Cloud Optimization. For many IT organizations, resetting multicloud estates is a good place to start. Crafting more efficient operations requires workload optimization or reallocating apps and data to locations in which they will perform better and at a lower cost. Accordingly, IT leaders need specialists who can facilitate cloud repatriation. These experts will not only retrieve workloads from public clouds (or other locations) but move them to on-premises datacenters, colos, private clouds or different public clouds. 37Signals, for instance, expects to save $7 million over 5 years by repatriating from public cloud to on-premises.

This is Ground Control to Major Cloud. Often the native tooling required to run apps in multiple public clouds presents learning curves and technical challenges for IT. Fortunately, ground-to-cloud solutions enable IT to run storage software built for on-premises environments in public clouds, enabling IT to work with familiar technologies without refactoring applications. To flex this organizational muscle, IT leaders need to hire or train IT specialists who can comfortably connect their assets to public clouds, ensuring optimal outcomes. A ground-to-cloud solution and specialist can provide more operational consistency while enabling teams to benefit from familiar features and functionality.

Pulling the Cloud Down to Earth. As critical a lever as ground-to-cloud can be, some organizations may find value in running the cloud stacks and Kubernetes clusters they operate in public clouds on-premises, in colos or edge environments. This cloud-to-ground approach can help software developers build and run applications using the cloud technologies to which they’re accustomed. And it would allow IT to run workloads wherever the business needs—without technology limitations. As this is an emerging use case and few specialists can wrangle multiple clouds, it is incumbent on IT leaders to train staff to manage how the organization deploys cloud software on-premises.

Metacloud Magic. Some cloud experts are opining on the rise of the so-called metacloud, or a platform that will help organizations manage multicloud workloads from a single dashboard. Achieving the necessary abstraction—let alone interoperability—across disparate systems is a lofty goal. In the meantime, organizations should pick management consoles that enable IT to easily order and configure additional server and storage capacity as business needs dictate. And they will need to tab an expert comfortable with the many abstraction options afforded by cloud technologies to manage the console, incorporate new features and train developer and infrastructure teams on how to access it.

Ultimately, finding enough staffers to work with these toolsets and approaches may be easier said than done. Seventy-one percent of organizations are struggling to staff their cloud initiatives appropriately, according to an online survey by Forrester Research. ¹

Our Dell APEX portfolio offers organizations versatile as-a-Service solutions in a pay-per-use consumption model. This includes helping IT departments operate storage software in public clouds and run cloud experiences in their datacenters, colo and edge environments—and even manage assets from a central console.

Because like craftworkers, IT leaders shouldn’t operate without flexible utilities The right tools to execute their strategic vision—and the talent to wield them.

Learn more about our Dell Technologies APEX portfolio of cloud experiences.

1The Future of a Secure Multicloud Strategy Will Be Powered by Modern Applications, Forrester, May 2022