Many businesses would ultimately like to automate IT service delivery through a self-service catalog by way of a hybrid cloud. The hybrid cloud delivers the following benefits:

• A single control point for on-premises and off-premises resources
• Automation that streamlines delivery of IT resources in a consistent and repeatable manner aligned with business best practices
• Metering, which allows the IT team to communicate the value of services while providing the business with visibility as to resource cost and consumption
• Self-service, empowering application owners and business users to access the resources they need, when they need them
• Capacity management, which allows the IT team to better manage resources across the hybrid cloud
• Monitoring and reporting, providing visibility to the capacity, performance, and health of the environment
• Integrated security to protect enterprise workloads
• Service-level choice that aligns workloads to service levels and cost objectives
• Ability to meet the service level agreements with application-level granularity

The vision of hybrid clouds is not new. Businesses have tried to deploy hybrid clouds using traditional infrastructure based on scale-up storage accessed over a storage network that is deployed and scaled in big chunks. While building cloud capabilities on traditional three‐tier infrastructure with scale‐up storage is possible, this approach is not the optimal solution.

For businesses that want IT transformation to the cloud to support their application environment, Dell Technologies can modernize, automate, and transform IT operations with complete turnkey, hybrid cloud platforms built on hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI).

Accelerating IT transformation with Dell HCI

One of the first steps a business can take in its transformation journey is to simplify infrastructure deployment and management by introducing HCI into the environment. HCI systems essentially collapse the traditional three-tier server, network, and storage model so that the infrastructure itself is much easier to manage.

HCI solutions that natively integrate compute, storage, virtualization, management, and data services significantly reduce IT administrative tasks and create the foundation for a modern IT infrastructure. HCI solutions are optimal for reducing infrastructure costs and simplifying management, regardless of workload deployment and extent of implementation.

Innovate rather than integrate

Businesses have the option of building a fully customized solution. Integrating storage, networking, compute, data protection, monitoring and reporting, and then figuring out how to get all of them to work together can be time consuming. However, it provides the most flexibility for an organization that might want prescribed vendor components as a part of their solution. Planning, designing, and building a custom solution is a complex project. It often takes months or years to come to fruition—too long if a business needs to roll out a solution to address immediate business needs. Further, it can be costly to maintain or update over the long term.

The challenge for IT is that complexity exists at each solution layer, so building and maintaining a functional, resilient cloud can be difficult. Many companies find that doing it themselves requires more than 70 percent of their IT resources and budget,^[2] leaving few resources to focus on innovation and projects that add real value to the business. 

For most businesses, the best way to consume HCI solutions is to buy them fully integrated with life cycle management (LCM) and single source of support. Buying rather than building delivers the accelerated deployment and operational simplicity. Automation and orchestration of system administration tasks can result in a 5-year total cost of ownership (TCO) savings of 489 percent over a traditional three-tier, build-your-own approach.^[3]

[2] How IT Transformation Maturity Drives IT Agility, Innovation, and Improved Business Outcomes, April 2017, Enterprise Strategy Group.

[3] Delivering Efficient Business Expansion with Dell EMC VMware-based HCI, October 2018, IDC.