Dell Technologies is a leading technology solution provider that focuses both on businesses and consumers. Murray Irvine, Senior Director, Data Centre Compute and Solutions – MERAT, Dell speaks to The Integrator on various aspects of cloud solutions and digital transformation support the company offers to its enterprise customers.

How Dell helps small, medium, and large enterprises with digital transformation?

Digital transformation is a top priority for businesses in the Middle East as organizations, both large and small, that continue to leverage the latest technologies to drive innovation and growth.

Regional businesses have transformed the way they consume and deploy software infrastructure and applications. This includes a growing demand for cloud technologies, with a focus on hybrid models, which enable businesses to adapt and grow in today’s data-driven, location-independent era. This shift was noted in Dell’s Digital Transformation Index study, where 80 percent of global businesses accelerated their digital transformation plans, with 79 percent reinventing their business model due to disruption caused by the pandemic. In the region, the study showed that 90 percent of organizations in UAE and Saudi Arabia, fast-tracked their digital transformation programs in 2020.

In this critical time of change, Dell Technologies’ end-to-end product and services enable customers to create remote workforces, secure critical data, and scale without disruption.  It works closely with small, medium, and large enterprises to address pressing business challenges with its world-class, end-to-end services, and solutions that span the cloud, data center, and the edge.

Tell us how cloud-based infrastructure and platforms offered by Dell help businesses grow, improve flexibility, and increase profitability?

Dell Technologies Cloud is a suite of cloud solutions that provide a consistent operating model for easier management of public, private, and edge cloud resources. Reports cite that over 50% of infrastructure will be deployed at the edge by 2023, which illustrates the value of multi-cloud to manage all environments consistently. It provides organizations with convenient and on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources including servers, storage, applications, networks, and other computing services.

Rather than acquiring, installing, and maintaining computing technology on-premises, with the Dell Technologies Cloud services, organizations can quickly add capacity without incurring capital expense while significantly increasing agility and scalability. It allows organizations to simplify operations, improve cloud economics, eliminate operational silos and manage hybrid cloud infrastructure with ease.

Furthermore, the solutions combine cost-effective, scalable, and resilient data storage with native public cloud services to deliver the best of both worlds for the cloud. These solutions are ideal for deploying demanding, data-intensive applications on multiple public clouds. The services are fully-managed by Dell Technologies, thereby freeing an organizations’ valuable resources to run their business rather than managing the infrastructure.

Kindly articulate hybrid cloud and differentiate it from multi-cloud services from a business perspective

Hybrid cloud environments are composed of two or more public or private cloud infrastructures that are connected by standardized technology for orchestrating workloads across clouds, enabling cloud resources to work together to manage cloud servers, storage, and networking resources.

Multi-cloud computing on the other hand refers to the use of multiple cloud services rather than relying on a single cloud service provider. A multi-cloud environment typically uses two or more public cloud services (provided by third-party providers). Multi-cloud environments may also include a private cloud, which involves cloud technology that resides within a company’s own data center.

As opposed to multi-cloud environments where each cloud has its own set of tools and processes, a hybrid cloud with a consistent management experience provides a common set of tools, significantly reducing the cost and complexity of managing hybrid cloud environments.  Enterprises today are transitioning from multi-cloud strategies to hybrid cloud environments to extract more benefit from their cloud investments.

Speak about the collaborations that Dell have made to strengthen its cloud deployment and support services

Our partners are at the forefront of solving customers’ most pressing cloud challenges and we’re focused on continuing to build this ecosystem for the benefit of our customers. They play an instrumental role in instilling the possibility of what can be achieved while guiding customers through a data-centric and insights-driven roadmap.

Businesses understand that having the right partner to collaborate in today’s fast-paced environment is truly a competitive advantage. We enable enterprises to seamlessly extend the hybrid cloud experience to partners such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and more than 4,200 additional cloud partners.

Discuss the scope of cloud-based infrastructure and related solutions in the post-pandemic era

Hybrid cloud is proving to be a significant gamechanger as organizations look to unify their environments and get superior flexibility, scale, agility, innovation, and a consumption model that aligns with their business needs.

This includes incorporating a mix of on-premises data centers to public clouds and the emerging edge —allowing them to have greater control of their workloads, data, and cloud journey. By 2022, IDC predicts that over 90% of enterprises worldwide will be relying on a cloud mix to meet their needs, with 2021 being a defining year for the multi-cloud.

The increased interest in hybrid cloud is driven mainly by cloud edge computing. As enterprises turn to cloud edge computing to better manage and process the vast amount of data being generated by edge devices, they seek more hybrid cloud architecture solutions to help them streamline their operations. This shift will drive momentum for hybrid cloud operating models that extend out to the edge, beyond the traditional data center. As adoption increases, we will see more organizations taking up as-a-service models for the cloud, spanning Infrastructure-as-a-service (Iaas), Platform-as-a-service (Paas), and Software-as-a-service (SaaS) to leverage the benefits cloud offers.

This presents a real opportunity for customers to increase investments in distributed technology infrastructure. In particular, ensuring that the tech infrastructure they invest in is simpler and faster to deploy. Dell Technologies enables organizations to unlock better outcomes by building on tools and skill set that provide a consistent experience across hybrid cloud environments.