It’s no secret that organizations are constantly seeking new ways to optimize IT strategy in today’s fast-paced business world. Cloud computing has emerged as a powerful tool with its on-demand scaling, quick provisioning and enterprise-class services.

But with an ever-expanding range of IT providers, many IT operation teams are turning to a multicloud approach to meet their requirements. While multicloud has its benefits, it also comes with unique challenges, noted theCUBE industry analyst Dave Vellante.

“For example, according to the Dell Innovation Index, management complexity and siloed experiences are among the top five roadblocks that prevent organizations from fully embracing multicloud environments,” Vellante said. “Before making the leap to multicloud, it’s important to find a solution that provides greater simplicity and scalability that’s required for multicloud success.”

Dell Technologies Inc. is attempting to address those challenges with its Dell APEX Navigator for multicloud. Those possible solutions were the focus of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of this week’s “Elevate Your Multicloud Experience With Dell APEX Navigator” event.

Analysts for theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, spoke with key Dell executives about the latest news in regards to APEX Navigator for Multicloud Storage. They explored how Dell APEX is supporting organizations through hyperscale integrations to deliver a consistent experience on-prem for interoperability and data mobility. (* Disclosure below.) 

Here are three key insights you may have missed from the “Elevate Your Multicloud Experience” event:

1. Key challenges have been emerging.

Exponentially growing data and a dispersed nature mean a large majority of organizations today identify as being multicloud. They are also investing in private cloud infrastructure, according to Shannon Champion, vice president of product marketing at Dell.

“In talking with customers, we’re seeing a consistent set of challenges emerge, which is keeping them from really innovating with multicloud,” she said.

The challenge that rises to the top for organizations is unpredictable costs, with Dell often hearing that it’s difficult to forecast budget requirements and plans when faced with sporadic unplanned cloud costs. A second challenge has to do with management complexity.

“Customers are really grappling with how to get control of their management when you have data spread across so many locations on-prem and in the public cloud,” Champion said. “We’re also hearing from them that the cloud inconsistencies are creating some challenges for them. Because each different public cloud has different security models, they offer different enterprise-class storage software, feature sets and capabilities.”

A final challenge has to do with limited visibility. Organizations are struggling to get a holistic view of where its data lives, according to Champion.

“Which is kind of scary and leads to security and compliance challenges,” she said.

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Shannon Champion:

2. The goal? A consolidated cloud management experience.

Attempting to solve the challenges mentioned above is where Dell APEX comes in. APEX was created to deliver multicloud by design — a “seamless modern cloud” and consumption experiences in all locations that bring “simplicity, agility and control,” according to Champion.

“When you think about the APEX strategy, there’s really three main elements,” she said. “The first is, how do we help our customers go from ground to cloud? We’re doing that by bringing our leading enterprise-class storage software across block, file and data protection to the leading public cloud providers.”

The company calls that APEX Storage for Public Cloud. The second part of the strategy involves taking cloud ecosystems that organizations choose and bringing them back on-prem with consistency and control.

“We’re doing that across the common cloud stacks on-prem with our new turnkey APEX Cloud Platforms,” Champion said.

Simplifying multicloud experiences for companies is the third part of the strategy. It takes a broad set of dedicated IT landscapes across the board with subscription and as-a-service offers.

“When you look at that from a storage perspective, all of this together really creates that universal storage layer, this common set of software-defined storage services everywhere,” Champion said.

3. Enhanced data mobility and zero-trust security are key focuses.

At its annual Dell Technologies World conference earlier this year, Dell debuted broad upgrades to its APEX portfolio. The company’s latest announcements are intended to continue delivering on those promises, according to Alyson Langon (pictured, right), director of product marketing at Dell.

“Our first set of management and operations capabilities within the Dell APEX Navigator family are going to be generally available with the announcement of Dell APEX Navigator for multicloud,” she said. “With this offer, it’s essentially going to deliver improved TCO, centralized management, seamless data mobility, operational consistency between on-prem and your public cloud environments, and unparalleled performance.”

During the this week’s event, the company announced the general availability of new capabilities for multicloud management, along with APEX Block Storage for Amazon Web Services Inc. public cloud users. There was a key goal involved when this process started, according to Magi Kapoor (left), director of multicloud product management at Dell.

“Our goal when we started to engineer and architect our product, we wanted to simply bring a centralized management toolset for our storage customers that is not just centralized, but also provides a very secure environment for our customers,” she said. “The top things that we’re bringing to market with this first release is block storage on AWS, and it revolves around five things — first and foremost, security.”

The second detail has to do with deployment. As the company brings its storage endpoints to the cloud, the question becomes how can it easily automate the deployment process not just of its storage endpoint, but also the underlying public cloud infrastructure, according to Kapoor.

“The third piece, as we move on, is the management aspect of it. How do you manage securely but also do lifecycle management on your endpoints across the board?” she said. “Doing that as a SaaS portal is what we’re bringing.”

Fourth, it’s all about monitoring. The question there is, how does one monitor one’s endpoints once they are deployed in the public cloud?

“I do want to call out that it’s not just monitoring of your cloud endpoints, but also bringing in that on-prem aspect of it,” Kapoor said.

Finally, the fifth tenet has to do with data mobility: “The seamless ability to move data, move the workload between on-prem and the public cloud depending on whether your business needs change or upgrade, or your workloads change,” Kapoor added. “Those are the key things that we’re bringing to market.”

When it comes to outcomes that organizations should expect from this latest update, it’s about unlocking a “new standard of excellence” with multicloud management and operations, according to Langon. Dell aims to get companies up and running quickly through the self-service APEX Console or APIs.

“They’re going to be able to optimize workload placement more easily with purposeful data and application mobility. You’re going to be able to reduce risk with secure operations and zero-trust adoption,” Langon said. “You’re going to be able to do all of this from that single, centralized user interface. All of this value just builds upon the value of our storage endpoints in the cloud as well, which are essentially bringing enterprise-class storage capabilities into a public cloud environment.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Alyson Langon and Magi Kapoor:

To watch more of theCUBE’s coverage of the “Elevate Your Multicloud Experience With Dell APEX Navigator” event, here’s our complete event video playlist:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the “Elevate Your Multicloud Experience With Dell APEX Navigator” event. Neither Dell Technologies Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE