A Year in the Life of Our Cloud Journey: From App Strategies and Management Tools to Self-Service

This year has placed unprecedented demands on IT infrastructure as our workforces shifted to work from home. It has also spotlighted just how important keeping pace with changing technology is in being ready for whatever comes our way. So, as we close out this year and look to the next, it seems like a good time to revisit a crucial factor at the heart of unlocking Dell’s flexible IT delivery—our ongoing transformation to modern cloud technology.

Early this year, I invited you to Follow Us to the Cloud Using Dell Technology, describing how Dell Digital, Dell’s IT organization, is building a modern data center using our own groundbreaking technology. Like many of you, we are on an ongoing cloud journey and are sharing insights as we go along.

Of course, a crucial part of transforming your organization to a modern, multi-cloud environment is modernizing legacy applications and workloads in order to leverage cloud technology. Throughout this past year and into the next, Dell Digital is working to modernize hundreds of applications in our legacy data center and to host the resulting workloads in our new cloud environment. Blog two, An App and Workload Strategy for the Cloud, details the tools and unique approach we are using to accomplish this transition.

As the year progressed, I offered insights on the evolving number of capabilities offered by IT infrastructure management tools aimed at providing a seamless link between private and public clouds. In light of that evolution, Dell Digital is pursuing standardizing and automating management of our multi-cloud environment, so our IT innovators can focus on solving bigger, more relevant challenges higher in the technology stack.  The key question: What Do You Want Your Smart IT People Doing?

And finally, with the creation of our cloud environment and resulting lower service costs, reduced provisioning time, increased agility and automation, I provided a glimpse of the next milestone for IT— our quest to give users direct choices over the infrastructure services they consume. How? Check out 4 Keys To Delivering Self-Service IT – Giving Users Control Of Their Infrastructure.

It has been a busy year in Dell digital transformation, and I expect the new year will bring still more infrastructure modernization milestones. I look forward to sharing more first-hand experiences with you in 2021.

Happy Holidays.

About the Author: Kevin Herrin

As Vice President of Dell Digital’s (Dell’s IT organization) Infrastructure Platform & Engineering organization, Kevin Herrin is responsible for global data center, platform, database, public and private cloud, network, voice, and call center telephony infrastructures. He is also responsible for the financial management of those infrastructure platforms. Kevin is a strategic, multi-dimensional technology executive, with a proven track record of delivering profitable growth and organizational impact through large-scale, disruptive technology and its business applications. He is an energetic change agent and visionary respected for his skills in structuring and growing complex teams, operating in chaotic environments, and developing relationships with colleagues, clients and executives. Prior to joining Dell, Kevin was founder and CEO of Technology Pathfinders Consulting, a consulting firm offering client organizations DevOps, Cloud Engineering and Transformation, and Operational Optimization. He has also held a variety of engineering and leadership roles at Virtustream, EMC, VMware and AT&T.