As legacy enterprises begin to find their footing in virtualization through multicloud offerings, businesses are increasingly reconstructing protection practices, budgets, and entire strategies around new data processes. In order to guide users during this challenging, opaque endeavor, Dell EMC is building bridges in both technology and customer support to address a range of custom needs.

“We’re living in a world now of hybrid cloud and hybrid data protection, which is why you need to rethink how you extend the great capabilities you built on-premise and make them work in a cloud environment,” said Christophe Bertrand (pictured, right), senior analyst, data protection at Enterprise Strategy Group, an information technology research and strategy firm.

Bertrand and Emmett Kaczmarek (pictured, left), field chief technology officer, data protection solutions, at Dell EMC, spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and David Floyer (@dfloyer), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the VMworld conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed developments in VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services Inc., as well as how they’re working to stay ahead of customer needs. (* Disclosure below.)

Optimizing cloud spend

Promises of cloud performance and cost efficiencies have driven a scaling number of migrations over this period of digital transformation. AWS has doubled in usage in the past four years, according to ESG research. And Dell EMC has seen massive customer adoption, specifically since the launch of deployment capabilities through the AWS Marketplace and Azure Marketplace.

“Specifically with AWS, we were driving three petabytes a month for consumption with our data protection products into the Amazon Cloud. Today, that’s up to 20 petabytes a month,” Kaczmarek said.

The mission for businesses of all sizes is always cost reduction, and cloud migration poses a major IT spending initiative. While it can create additional expenses, Kaczmarek’s team works to ensure cloud computing is a long-term saver for customers through the deduplication technology that shrinks their overall footprint down to what they actually consume — optimizing spend as use increases.

“Taking those protection capabilities that our customers were leveraging on-prem, with our proven solutions deploying them up in [VMware Cloud on AWS], and leveraging that power of an [Amazon] S3 bucket on top of deduplication with it equates to less cost for the customer and more efficiencies overall,” Kaczmarek said.

A recent ESG survey of Dell EMC customers identified a more than 70-percent savings via S3 storage as a result of its built-in deduplication. “When you talk about the cost of data protection, there’s also the cost of not protecting data. And that can be much higher,” Bertrand said.

That cost can come in the form of inefficient backups, ransomware attacks, and a lack of orchestrated failback, all issues Dell EMC provides integrated support for in its tools running in public cloud.

“Our customers have made this investment on-prem. They want to come back eventually, so one of the key aspects with our technology is we have orchestrated Failback as part of the process to help them get back on-prem when it’s appropriate,” Kaczmarek concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld conference. (* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment, with additional broadcast sponsorship from VMware Inc. Dell, VMware, and other sponsors do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE