Business leaders around the world are embracing a hybrid cloud strategy. Digital transformation has clearly accelerated due to the COVID-19 pandemic and organizations understand that hybrid is the right model for building a future-proof IT infrastructure. It offers them the best of public and private cloud, including edge technologies with greater choice and flexibility. In Luxembourg, Dell Technologies has been leading the way, resulting in a massive adoption of Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) technologies to drive Data Center modernization and hybrid cloud embracement.

Article by Pierre Henin, Director Enterprise Dell Technologies Luxembourg

Even before the onset of this global health crisis, cloud adoption was seen as a potential path to progress and evolve. To stay relevant, companies must find new, innovative and sustainable ways to meet demand and add value. In the past, many decisions about workload transition have been made without a long-term plan or vision, and investments did not always result in the best overall solutions. Numerous companies have brought their workloads back in-house because the costs of public cloud were much higher than expected.

Strict regulations can also be an obstacle to free externalization of data. That is why many companies in Luxembourg have first implemented a private cloud model. By now, it has become clear that hybrid is the future and Luxembourg businesses are clearly leading the race. Supported by Dell Technologies, many companies in this small country are running their most critical applications on an on-premises HCI Software Defined Data Center platform.

Dell Technologies as a standard

A Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) is the underlying foundation of on-premises cloud technology and a solid base to develop a hybrid cloud model. HCI is a software-defined, unified system that combines all the components of a traditional data center: storage, compute, network and management. As an integrated solution, HCI uses software and x86 servers to replace expensive, purpose-built hardware. A Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) is a data center in which infrastructure is virtualized and delivered as-a-service.

Luxembourg companies are ahead of the rest of the world in SDDC adoption. They have to run a ‘best of breed’ application portfolio and look for a platform that is extremely flexible but also fully industrialized and managed through a uniform operating model. Dell Technologies has been a clear a leader in providing these solutions, enabling IT departments to run traditional workloads alongside cloud-native, container-based applications with one fully automated platform.

The latest IDC number for the HCI market in the region indicates that Dell Technologies has around 68% share. This represents a predominant position and makes this platform a new standard in the industry. Dell Technologies is the only infrastructure provider who can offer such an exhaustive integrated stack. We also deliver the necessary operational capabilities to automatically provision, manage and monitor the stack.

Digital transformation

Cloud is an operating model, but there is often a lack of understanding of the required steps to achieve a smooth migration and successful transformation of the IT infrastructure. In addition, outsourcing a service will not improve an organization’s operating maturity unless the model has first been successfully adopted internally.

There are four key challenges an IT organization must address to support digital transformation and its sustainability ambitions. First, they need to improve operational efficiency in managing their data center. Second, they must run traditional and cloud-native applications on a single platform by creating a developer-ready Kubernetes platform. It is also important to consolidate data centers to boost performance, reduce energy consumption and provide significant cost savings. And finally, organizations need to create a consistent operational model to access a full hybrid cloud strategy.

In a few years, most traditional data centers in Luxembourg will have disappeared to make way for a hybrid/multi-cloud approach. At Dell Technologies, we expect that most companies will maintain a balance between in-house and public, but we also predict to see a drastic improvement in the operational maturity as organizations go into a more automatic management. There will also be a clear evolution in the acquisition approach by only investing through a real ‘utility’ financial model.

Operating in a fierce competitive environment, Luxembourg companies have modernized their IT to survive and grow. A hybrid model gives them the flexibility, capability and agility to scale up their success and outpace their competitors, now and after the pandemic.