How to Simplify Multi-Cloud Management with Dell APEX Cloud Platform
As cloud strategies have become more common in many organizations, so have the headaches they can sometimes cause. Working with different cloud providers also often means dealing with different services, APIs, and management tools. This can make it harder for IT teams to maintain consistency across your cloud solutions. It’s also more difficult to stay on top of the costs associated with cloud solutions or the resources being used.
Dell’s APEX Cloud Platform streamlines the management of cloud environments. You can establish multi-cloud by design as a strategy to handle all cloud platforms from one place. Let’s look at how Dell’s APEX Cloud Platform can help your company optimize its multi-cloud environment.
The Value of Multi-Cloud Management in Modern IT Infrastructure
Multi-cloud management is critical to maintaining a modern IT premises infrastructure. Without the right solutions, businesses can face a variety of challenges, and dealing with the fallout can undermine the benefits of using cloud platforms.
1. Complex Overhead
It’s hard for IT teams to monitor and manage services for every cloud provider’s management interface. Teams often use different tools to monitor, secure, and deploy applications in cloud environments, adding to management overhead. Having more tools can increase the chance of human error that causes issues that affect productivity.
2. Security and Compliance Risks
Cloud providers have individual security protocols and configurations. It’s difficult to apply consistent security policies without a centralized management system. This can lead to gaps in security controls that expose data, increasing the risk of a breach. Multi-cloud environments make it more complicated to track data, including how it’s processed and stored, which can cause violations of regulations like GDPR and HIPAA. Thus, proper management of these multi-cloud environments is mission critical.
3. Out of Control Costs
A lack of centralized management can lead to situations like individual teams provisioning cloud resources without proper approval or tracking them accurately. That can cause storage, instances, and services to go underutilized or unused, resulting in wasted cloud spending.
4. Data Issues
If there's no centralized way of tracking data updates, teams may be storing cloud data in isolated environments, creating a situation where updates in one environment aren't reflected in other data stores. It’s harder for teams to access reliable data, leading to slower decision-making and complicating efforts at analytics and reporting.
Dell APEX Cloud Platform Overview and Key Benefits
Dell APEX Cloud Platform is a hybrid, multi-cloud solution that helps organizations manage, deploy, and scale cloud environments. With Dell APEX Cloud Platform, organizations can optimize their use of cloud ecosystems like RedHat, OpenShift, and Microsoft Azure. It provides a standard set of building blocks that gives IT teams the flexibility needed for greater innovation.
Enhanced Visibility
Solutions like Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Azure provide organizations with cost breakdowns for different cloud environments. This helps companies identify where money is going and determine whether resources are appropriately allocated in a multi-cloud environment. The usage trends also help with setting budgets and determining future costs.
Integrated Security
Dell APEX offers end-to-end data encryption for information both at rest and in transit. You can apply uniform security policies across all cloud environments. There are also pre-configured compliance templates and reporting available to meet standards like ISO and GDPR.
Data Portability and Integration
With Dell APEX, IT teams can use standardized APIs to integrate data across cloud platforms. It also simplifies transferring data between public, on-premise, and edge environments. That means that teams have access to the same data sets when collaborating and making decisions for the company.
Mitigated Vendor Lock-In
The proprietary nature of technology from cloud providers can limit organizational flexibility. Dell APEX reduces these risks by supporting open standards and multi-cloud orchestration. The open architecture ensures the platform complies with different cloud providers and technology. There’s also container support to facilitate application portability.
Core Features of Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Multi-Cloud Environments
Let’s look at how Dell APEX helps you optimize hybrid cloud strategies.
Seamless Integrations with AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud
You can set up more efficient data movement between your on-premises system and public cloud solutions. APEX data storage services simplify data replication and migration between cloud environments for consistent operations. You can also integrate enterprise-grade file storage natively into solutions like Google Cloud.
Dell APEX's pay-per-use model aligns with the billing approach taken by providers like Azure. You can scale resources to fit your needs, which reduces upfront infrastructure costs. Cost transparency tools are also provided that allow you to optimize your spending among cloud providers.
Optimized Solutions for Azure Environments
Dell APEX comes with preconfigured infrastructure for hybrid environments. You can quickly enable Azure-native services that run on-premises and provide consistent management for a better multi-cloud experience.
You can also reduce complexity using Azure Arc or other Azure management tools. APEX Backup Services provides cloud-based backup and recovery to protect data in a hybrid infrastructure.
Full Compatibility with VMware
Dell APEX provides businesses with VMware Cloud Foundation, a fully integrated solution for hybrid cloud environments. With it, IT teams can keep operations and workload placement consistent between on-site data centers and public cloud services. There’s also native support for VMware vSphere, NSX, and vSAN. That means you can run thin client workloads as needed without refactoring.
In addition, users can use tools like vCenter to manage infrastructure and vRealize Suite to execute advanced automation. The Dell APEX console integrates with VMware environments to allow for centralized monitoring and provisioning, resulting in a single-pane-of-glass management style for Dell infrastructure and VMware workloads. It helps organizations realize the benefits of remote desktops from Dell.
Advanced Compute Resources and Cloud Storage Innovations
With Dell APEX Cloud Services, you can use different compute options tailored to different workloads. The cloud client workspace also provides elastic scaling so businesses can adjust to sudden changes in demand without facing hardware procurement delays.
Dell APEX can work with edge computing environments to handle low-latency applications. It also supports workload portability across cloud environments using cloud-native architecture. This allows your IT team to deploy applications from anywhere without degrading performance or security.
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