Exclusive Interview: Varun Chhabra, VP, Product Marketing, Dell Technologies Cloud

In an Exclusive Interview with DQ Channels, Varun Chhabra, VP, Product Marketing, Dell Technologies Cloud talked about multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud strategies, Challenges, benefits of multi-cloud and how Dell Technologies enabling the multi-cloud transition. 

What are the changes you have seen in Indian CXO’s buying behavior for the cloud?

We are seeing a few primary changes in cloud buying behavior in India as well as other parts of the world.

• Multi-cloud is a reality: While organizations are in different stages of their cloud journey, nearly all organizations are deploying workloads across two or more clouds. The reality is that the multi-cloud era – meaning organizations deploy applications across on-premises, the public cloud, and edge environments – is here to stay. However, as organizations work across multiple clouds, they are seeing increased organizational complexity and incompatibility across platforms. Because of this, we expect CXOs to increasingly invest in technology vendors that can provide seamless compatibility across their cloud and on-premises infrastructure going forward.
• Organizations want to consume cloud their way: Customers are demanding flexible consumption models. They want to consume the cloud in a way that aligns with their own desires or requirements. Industry research is also suggesting that businesses are increasingly expressing a preference for Opex vs Capex models for IT spending and that this will continue to increase over time. CXOs are evaluating consumption-based and as-a-service delivery models because it provides them with greater choice, flexibility, and predictable outcomes. This will only get more important in the years to come.

Do you think multi-cloud is a trend that is here to stay or a fad that only the most cutting edge will embrace?

Multi-cloud is the reality that most organizations live in today. In fact, the long-standing debate of years past – the debate on whether applications are moving fully to the public cloud or staying on-premises – is nearing the end. Gartner estimates that by 2021, 75 percent of midsize and large organizations will have adopted multi-cloud or a hybrid IT strategy. This estimate alone shows that 2020 is going to be a year of fast acceleration for organizations.

While multi-cloud is already most organizations’ reality, there’s also a need to create a consistent cloud experience across on-premises, off-premises, and edge environments. We believe organizations are increasingly adopting this same view.

 How does a multi-cloud strategy offer an edge over the hybrid-cloud strategy?

The terms multi-cloud and hybrid cloud often hold different meanings to different people. It’s important to think about them as they relate to what organizations are trying to achieve.

With regard to multi-cloud, we see organizations needing to consume different services from different cloud service providers in order to meet a diverse set of needs. When we refer to a hybrid cloud, that implies a consistency of experience across all of an organizations’ cloud environments, whether they are off-premises (public cloud) or in customer datacenters (private cloud).

Rather than contrasting these two approaches, organizations should be looking to embrace both so that they can get the best of both worlds.

What are the challenges with the multi-cloud strategy?

For many organizations, the increasingly diverse application landscape is resulting in an enormous amount of IT complexity. Adding to the complexity is the fact that most organizations are deploying their workloads across two or more clouds, with each cloud deployment carrying out different standards and unique management challenges. This had led to organizational complexity and silos, disparate M&O tools and inconsistent SLAs to manage.  Solving this complexity is one of the biggest IT challenges that we see organizations facing in 2020 and it’s the reason we introduced Dell Technologies Cloud in 2019.

What are the best practices for Multi-Cloud Security and Compliance?

In a highly distributed and multi-cloud world, the key is to extend security and management best practices to new cloud environments so that it is the same regardless of where the applications reside.  This reduces the risks associated with transitioning models and onboarding unfamiliar tools and practices.

Customers need to plan for not a world where workloads are going to be dynamic, going on- and off-premises seamlessly and changing over time. The most important benefit of having a consistent cloud operating environment is that organizations are able to evaluate the application that is right for each cloud and then move it back and forth without having to change the operating environment.

The single greatest mistake organizations can make is failing to understand the extent of the work they still have to do to secure the cloud. Often when purchasing IaaS offerings, organizations over-estimate the coverage they have purchased. Organizations should invest time and understand the Shared Responsibility Model that comes with consuming these services, while also assessing the risk to data and business continuity ahead of moving workloads to the cloud.

What are the strategic benefits of multi-cloud?

Multi-cloud has a diverse set of use cases that provide customers with many benefits, but it also brings many challenges when trying to manage across public, private and edge environments. Dell Technologies believes organizations should be able to move data and applications seamlessly across the cloud destination of choice, at any time—creating a truly agile hybrid cloud approach. By having a consistent operating model and management framework as part of your multi- and hybrid cloud strategy, customers can bring the benefits of cloud to their datacenters. They can transfer operations, management and security best practices to all clouds and extend them to the edge. Additionally, customers can accelerate innovation in any cloud, lower costs of service, reduce risk and retain autonomy.

How is Dell Technologies enabling the multi-cloud transition?

At Dell Technologies, you’ll hear us say that the cloud is not a destination, but an operating model. We recognize that data and applications should be able to seamlessly move to and from private, public and edge deployments, at any time. And that’s essentially what we are solving for with Dell Technologies Cloud.

Dell Technologies Cloud includes a set of cloud infrastructure solutions that combines our industry-leading cloud IT infrastructure (Dell EMC) with cloud software (VMware). This provides consistent operations approach that works across leading public cloud providers and a community of 4,200+ Cloud Service Providers standardized on VMware Cloud.