CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Srinivaschary T, Lead- Solution Architect, Dell Technologies India
- How businesses can develop a cost-effective model by shifting their workloads to service providers using multi-cloud services?
Multi-Cloud is a strategy many businesses are evaluating in their journey of transformation. The key drivers for this are application efficiency around latencies, data and IP security, and with finops playing an important role as well. The businesses today understand, in order to have the edge over others, infrastructure plays a key role as a strategy and optimising their IT strategy with multi-cloud delivers on this bet. The most important part of this journey is to identify which workloads run where in this multi-cloud world.
The first step is to analyse the workloads they run, identify dependencies, chart out options and architectures, and then evaluate the right place for it to run for optimised results.
While cost evaluation is a continuous process and needs to be monitored at regular intervals to ensure the environment is running optimally, choosing the right service provider is also of utmost importance. The service provider must have the ability to tailor solutions to fit the enterprise’s need and manage workloads in the IT landscape.
With Dell Technologies’ wide range of services, businesses can take advantage of varied services solutions. The new Infrastructure-as-a-Service solution in the form of Dell-VMWare Cloud Platform gives organizations the ability to move workloads across multiple cloud environments and scale resources quickly with predictable pricing and transparent costs. Not only will they derive IT insights from a market leader like Dell Technologies, but they will also be able to manage their processes at a higher efficiency while engaging the workforce in organizational innovations.
2. What are the ways in which enterprises can overcome their storage related challenges with the use of a unified and simplified multi-cloud platform and, how Dell is enabling businesses with this change?
Data Strategy is one of the key aspects for any enterprise especially the ones leveraging Multi-cloud as a pivot for digital transformation. A good data strategy encompasses availability, security, governance, and performance amongst other parameters.
At Dell Technologies, our innovative suite of solutions help enterprises integrate cloud with ease, improving efficiency and ensuring a seamless management experience. Some of the benefits enterprises gain with Dell Technologies validated designs for multicloud storage solutions are improved performance with independent storage scaling, the ability to leverage existing investments in multi cloud infrastructure; and accelerate time to value with pre-tested infrastructure and deployment guidance. We also offer Storage as a Service which simplifies the connectivity to our best of breed enterprise class storage solution to the cloud of choice.
Proof of value lies when enterprises can:
a) Take advantage of enterprise-grade data security, capacity, availability and replication in the public cloud
b) Maximize security and control over the cloud data
c) Leverage public cloud resources and switch between them depending on the needs of applications and workloads
3. What is the importance of a well-planned and well-executed data strategy to drive a company’s successful cloud strategy?
As mentioned earlier, in todays world, Data is one of the most critical asset any organisation has. It is a resource which when harnessed appropriately, will help organisations identify insights which are valuable for the business. The challenges are multifold when a good multi-cloud strategy is adopted- with data distributed across multiple clouds. This is where a well-executed data strategy will help break the data silos.
The ability to build a strategy to leverage storage across various clouds and yet not compromise of security and hold onto good governance is the vision many organisations need to ensure. A haphazard strategy results in creating silos and also putting data at risk especially when the attacks are lot more concerted and planned. Poor strategy could put business at risk of losing critical data or getting locked out through a ransomware attack.
A robust strategy must allow for data to be managed, protected and monitored consistently without businesses losing sight of where their data resides. In addition to this, various data governance policies must be adhered to. This not only warrants data security and audit requirements in terms of the location of the data and how it is processed.
4. Why does security have to be a proactive thought rather than a reactive thought – multi-cloud adoption isn’t enough, businesses must secure and manage their data as well?
Today, the attacks are getting lot more sophisticated, they are no longer at perimeter, but the attacks are lot more focused on the core as well. There is no sure shot way to avoid being attacked. However, what would play a key role is to identify when under attack and how to mitigate and restrict losses and recover as fast as one can.
The Protect-Detect-Recover (PDR) strategy allows organizations to be able to protect their data and environment using multiple tools and solutions and ensure their safety from possible attacks. Organizations should be able to detect and take action, whether to isolate the environment thereby limiting the attack. The ability to ensure the pristine backup copy of data to be safe and not hampered needs to be part of the plan.
The ability to recover from this attack to the last best copy and keep the business on becomes the next big step in the strategy.
Dell Technologies has a suite of solutions and services around these technologies to ensure a well-protected environment for data in this multi cloud era.
