How to Enable Enterprise Agility Above Hybrid Cloud Environments

Of the many factors intensifying the need for agility in enterprise IT, a rapidly changing customer base is usually high on the list. 

Evolving customer needs

Although customers have always been an evolving group, technology has boosted the propensity to change. Today, the enterprise has a customer base that uses social media daily (think Facebook). These customers have easy, fast access to countless insights about how the enterprise does business. They have also come to think of mobile technologies, such as smartphones and wearables, as the starting point for finding the products, services and information they want and need. The most obvious impact is in areas are the taxi and movie industries, but virtually all industries are experiencing the fallout of this need for mobile responsiveness.

The enterprise, in turn, must be able to meet these new customer expectations while still effectively serving customers at various points on the technology adoption curve. For IT, this requires phenomenal agility and the ability to make decisions today to optimize for the current state of customer needs. At the same time, IT must plan for an inevitable need to change again, three or four years down the road, when customer needs evolve.

In other words: you must position yourself not only for today but also in such a way that you don’t lock yourself in over the long-term.

Agility is the new norm

In our daily conversations with customers it is clear that agility is the new norm. Cloud has enabled a new level of agility, allowing the enterprise to spin up a new environment quickly and efficiently. In this new business reality, the enterprise can acquire new customers, or bring innovative solutions to market much faster. But with speed comes complexity. For example, we hear from customers challenged to deliver innovative, net-new apps because those apps must speak to their existing — and occasionally legacy — applications and existing databases.

Leveraging hybrid cloud solutions

Leveraging hybrid cloud solutions is a solution to this problem. Here’s an example: Some workloads are relatively stable and don’t need to be spun up and down quickly. Other workloads regularly require significant variation in capacity. So we have developed orchestration and provisioning solutions for hosted private cloud (a stable environment for the first kind of workload) but we also provide a “utility zone” environment for transient workloads. This utility zone offers the on-demand convenience of public-cloud-style consumption, with the security of dedicated hardware.

The same orchestration capabilities we bring to private cloud extends across a complete hybrid cloud environment. This allows us the flexibility to bring our customers the best possible fit from within our public cloud ecosystem. And we can manage the workloads after you spin up the hybrid environment, to give you peace of mind. You can learn a bit more in this brief video with Lauren Nelson, Cloud Analyst with Forrester Research.

Enterprise Agility with Dell Services Featuring Forrester Research

The agility you can achieve above a hybrid cloud environment is closer than you think. Visit www.Dell.com/cloudservices, or contact a Dell Cloud Specialist to learn more.

About the Author: Steve Bodnar