Companies today are facing numerous challenges. How can we make numerous different solutions work as one? How can legacy applications be integrated with modern cloud solutions? What’s the role of SaaS, PaaS, on-premise solutions and containerised applications? How can a company guarantee effective disaster recovery? These are just a few of the questions IT departments are confronted with these days. In a nutshell, these days, IT managers are having to handle much more complex environments than back in 2005.
As the needs and expectations of users have increased driven by digitalisation and cloud applications, so have the challenges. We all know the situation: Individual departments have made the switch to software as a service offerings to be able to use the modern tools they need, but integration into enterprise networks has either been patchy or hasn’t happened at all. The result is shadow IT, data silos and security breaches that companies now have to battle against whilst also having to become more responsive and agile. After all, using a SaaS offer is only the first step towards the cloud.
So how should you tackle the mammoth project that is the cloud?
The thing to do now is to connect your on-premise infrastructure to the cloud, or indeed migrate it all. But what’s the best way? Who is the right cloud provider? As an SME, do I have to settle on a single cloud provider to be able to manage my infrastructure with the limited resources I have? Or would it be better to integrate a hybrid/multi-cloud approach to get the best value for money? Without a partner offering support in these issues, many IT departments, particularly those in SMEs, do not have enough staff to tackle a migration.
For a lot of these companies, the first viable option is a lift-and-shift approach which enables companies to move on-premise applications into the cloud without the need to change their design. The benefits are fast migration, in-cloud disaster recovery and the resolution of legacy IT issues. What’s more, it’s a good way to centralise resources used by multiple sites. While this is certainly not the cheapest approach, it does pave the way to the cloud. The second step is always to tweak and optimise in order to exploit the full potential of the cloud. In this way, SMEs in particular can quickly gain a modern infrastructure, for example by processing the same workload in the cloud and on-premise.
PowerStore by Dell Technologies – Simple scalability for both worlds.
This is exactly where Dell Technologies’ PowerStore comes into play as it combines both the traditional on-premise infrastructure with the cloud. It gives companies the ability to prioritise and manage data and operational requirements no matter if the apps are virtual or traditional, or if we are talking about traditional storage requirements or modern containers.
In this way, PowerStore supports businesses to meet the requirements of both legacy and modern workloads by enabling them to lift and shift some applications into the cloud while continuing to operate the others on-premise, giving them flexible storage through modular scale up and scale out capabilities. Dell Technologies offers a data-centric, intelligent and flexible storage platform for a variety of workloads, protocols and applications, tailored to SMEs and the challenges they face in a hybrid infrastructure. This combination of hypervisor and storage is unique to Dell Technologies.
Here’s an example. An SME has locations in Portugal, Germany and Poland. The workloads are run on-premises, close to production. By using the lift-and-shift approach supported by PowerStore, production can be quickly and easily relocated by dragging and dropping them from Location A to Location B. This is only possible with lift and shift not with migration to the cloud alone.
We empower business. Bechtle and Dell Technologies.
This example makes clear how important it is to tailor these hybrid solutions to the customers’ needs, and this is where Bechtle comes in. Thanks to our network of Bechtle Group experts, our customers can benefit from broad expertise as we work together with them to develop the ideal solution to meet their needs. Not only that, we also implement the solutions and are on hand to offer operational support. With Dell Technologies by our side, we at Bechtle are the strong partner companies need and can inject actual user feedback into Dell’s ongoing product development. With this partnership, we are ready for whatever the future holds.
