I spend a lot of time talking with customers about what we at Dell Technologies refer to as multicloud by design. One of Dell’s unique advantages when it comes to multicloud is our ability to provide a customer with solutions and services for their cloud platform of choice. Customers today are using a heterogeneous mixture of cloud services from multiple vendors, necessitating an approach that both meets them where they are in their cloud journey and provides them with choice in cloud platforms. Part of our multicloud by design approach is to align the needs of IT with the needs of the business, ensuring all decisions around cloud services are made to benefit the business.
The announcement of the new Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure reinforces the multicloud by design approach. Customers can bring Azure cloud services behind their firewalls and utilize the same familiar tools and technologies from Azure. This platform is also built on a common set of infrastructure building blocks to drive consistency, data mobility and ease of management and control, delivering a true Azure hybrid experience.
A Helping Hand
Once you have the platform in place, what’s next? This is where real work begins, and expertise is critical. Dell not only provides the hardware, but also value-add services for accelerating adoption of the Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure or the customer’s cloud of choice. With a focus on people, processes and workloads, the robust Dell services portfolio includes outcomes that span our four-phased approach, including deployment services to get the infrastructure stood up, a fully managed option to keep your teams focused on innovation and support services to keep things humming along smoothly.
We start with helping customers define a strategy and roadmap so they can see what good looks like and identify the concrete steps they need to get there. It’s important in this phase to both define strategy and bring key organizational stakeholders together to understand their cloud needs and goals for cloud consumption. We heard a customer once tell us they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars building out a cloud platform without actually talking to the teams that would be using it. Not surprisingly, their solution completely missed the mark. Our experts help customers develop a strategic plan with buy-in from all stakeholders so they can avoid potholes on the road to success.
Another key area for driving cloud consumption is automation and integration of the cloud platform into the systems that are critical to the business. Once we have deployed the platform, our automation services enable developers to do things like easily provision new Kubernetes instances for container orchestration and development, spin development environments up and down or integrate into their CI/CD pipelines. Without these key automation and integration services, it can be difficult to encourage developers and other cloud consumers to utilize the cloud.
Of course, it isn’t enough to just implement the cloud; you need to support and operationalize it to drive consumption. Cloud consumers need the data, tools and applications they use on a daily basis to be available and cloud-enabled. Dell does this by migrating workloads, making services available and seamless to use and listening to the needs of the business. We show customers how to continually measure the experience of the cloud consumer and how to take those insights and use them to improve the overall cloud experience. When we help customers adopt multicloud by design, we want to provide a cloud experience that enables them to consume the resources, services and applications they need in whichever cloud makes the most sense for the business. Cloud consumers get what they need efficiently, and IT can better manage their entire cloud estate. We then bring in our managed services to provide the day-to-day operations, enabling our customers to focus on value-driven activities like refactoring applications to be cloud native or introducing new cloud services. We proactively monitor, manage and operate the platform so our customers have one less thing to worry about when it comes to providing cloud services back to their business.
Bringing It All Together
At Dell, our services team utilizes a cloud adoption framework that is built upon our many years of experience delivering services to help customers achieve success in cloud. Whether we’re providing a customer with services to automate and integrate their Azure platform or providing managed services to take the burden off their IT staff, our services are a major differentiator for us and an accelerator for you. Our multicloud by design methodology is woven throughout our services and can help you implement, expand and scale your APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure investment.
This announcement builds on our well-established partnership with Microsoft spanning over 35 years, making Microsoft one of our longest standing and most trusted partners. Dell holds all of the Microsoft Solutions Partner competencies, has over 47,000 team members that hold Microsoft certifications and has earned more than 50 Microsoft Partner of the Year awards, most recently being named as a two-time recipient for 2023. Our collaboration with Microsoft on our solutions and our professional services helps to ensure our goals are aligned and we can provide the best outcomes for customers.
Where can we take you today? Contact your Dell Technologies Services representative to talk about how we can help you achieve success in cloud.
