This is the third blog highlighting the work we’re doing with Microsoft to deliver hybrid solutions for businesses. In our previous two blogs, we discussed how Dell and Microsoft are collaborating to help customers accelerate hybrid cloud adoption and simplify application modernization initiatives. Here, we will look at how we’re collaborating to simplify operations and deliver consistency for customers. There are a number of priorities we see impacting – and evolving – customers’ IT operations, such as:
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- Diversity of applications. Modern enterprises rely heavily on IT to deliver innovative applications and services that help enhance business agility while unlocking new opportunities and improving profitability. Increasingly, IT is adopting containerized, cloud native application architectures to keep pace with business demands. These apps do not replace the traditional run-the-business application typically deployed as virtual machines, resulting in proliferation of diverse application architectures with varying performance, scaling and availability requirements. IT needs consistent management and simpler operations to support their diverse application requirements.
- Expanding edge footprint. With proliferation of devices at edge locations, there is a vast amount of data being generated outside of conventional data centers. Having IT infrastructure dispersed across many locations raises new management and governance challenges.
- Flexible usage of cloud and on-premises resources. Over 92% of businesses have a multicloud strategy.¹ IT organizations increasingly want to be able to utilize on-premises and public cloud resources flexibly, and they want to optimize application and data placement based on workload and business requirements while ensuring simplicity of management and governance.
These trends are challenging the status quo for the traditional approaches to IT operations and management. Enterprises need modern approaches suited for the complex, dispersed IT landscapes they have to operate.
Dell and Microsoft have long partnered to deliver innovations that simplify customers’ operations and deliver predictability, and we continue to collaborate as customers adopt these new trends and paradigms. There are three areas where Dell and Microsoft continue to partner and innovate as it relates to optimizing IT operations.
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- Standardization of applications and infrastructure. Dell and Microsoft have partnered to optimize Microsoft applications and operating environments for Dell’s standard-based infrastructure platforms. Dell’s Integrated System for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI is a great example. Going further, Microsoft and Dell are working together to bring consistency to application environments with standardization. Dell’s collaboration with Microsoft for validating and documenting Microsoft Azure Arc-enabled app and data services further helps standardize how customers deploy advanced capabilities like DBaaS, Data Lake House and AI/ML Analytics consistently, predictably and efficiently. Dell is also optimizing the underlying infrastructure platforms so customers can effectively consolidate applications of diverse characteristics and varying criticality, both virtualized and containerized. By continuing to drive standardization and consolidation across customers’ application landscapes, Dell and Microsoft help simplify these environments and their management.
- Deep cross-layer integrations and intelligent automation. Today’s IT workflows have become complex. To achieve their objectives, IT teams must orchestrate processes that span multiple layers, from hardware infrastructure and operating environments to applications and service delivery. An integrated approach that intelligently automates these workflows dramatically improves the efficiency of platform teams, enabling them to operate these complex stacks predictably using common interfaces. As we continue our collaboration to address customers’ hybrid cloud priorities, you will see continued focus on automation in the areas of lifecycle management, security and compliance, as well as governance.
- Centralization of management and governance. With IT spread out across data centers, numerous edge locations and cloud destinations, centralization of management and governance is the key to reining in IT complexity. While both Dell and Microsoft have taken on several initiatives that simplify deployment and management of distributed IT, the Dell integrations with Arc-enabled services for management and governance is worth noting. Dell’s Azure Stack HCI solution offers extensive capabilities for centralizing management and governance through the Azure Portal. We are collaborating further to enhance these capabilities and enable customers to manage their entire IT landscape seamlessly, irrespective of location.
Dell and Microsoft have a history of innovation in delivering simpler, more predictable IT operations for customers. As customers evolve their priorities to extract the most value from new opportunities presented by containerization, edge computing and hybrid cloud, we’ll continue to collaborate to help streamline modern IT operations to market. Visit the Dell and Microsoft partnership page for more information on our innovations.
1 Flexera 2021 State of the Cloud report.
