Deploying Enterprise Hybrid Cloud in DELL EMC IT: The Ongoing Journey Part 1

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The old days of client servers and main frames are gone! So when our business customers first approached DELL EMC IT to “build a hybrid cloud,” it was not immediately clear what such an undertaking would entail.

DELL EMC IT is an internal division of DELL EMC, and being a client of our own product gave us unique insight into what other IT departments may be considering before deploying a cloud-based server. By exploring our own project goals and insights, DELL EMC IT was ironically weighing up the very same factors, namely cost, agility, ability to deliver and business expectations, which helped us better define our journey.

Of course, transitioning to a Hybrid Cloud platform requires a major cultural adjustment to get people to make the change with you. But DELL EMC IT hopes that by sharing our journey of the Hybrid Cloud we may motivate corporations to make that shift (for more details, check out our white paper).

How our Hybrid Cloud journey began

The term “cloud computing” is one of the industry’s most popular, and often misused, buzzwords. So we decided to do our own research online as well as consulting peers and professional consultants to define what it meant to us. In the end, we believed that the NIST Definition of Cloud Computing was most fitting to our vision of Hybrid Cloud transformation.

The NIST definition is as follows: “… a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”

 NIST also listed 5 key factors that defined cloud computing, which DELL EMC IT used as the cornerstones in developing our own strategy and represented the building blocks for the IT services that we planned to provide to our customers with:

  1. On-demand self-service
  2. Resource pooling
  3. Rapid elasticity
  4. Measured service
  5. Broad network access

With our design principles in place, we were able to identify two major issues: our inclination for custom-designed environments was inefficient and required too many resources to maintain, and the fact that we still siloed parts of our organization which delayed projects and did not take full advantage of our staff resources. This cemented in the fact that the need for digital transformation at DELL EMC IT was clearer than ever!

Continued…

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