Research and conversations have shown that the disparate nature of operations across multiple clouds creates significant challenges for organizations. Securing and deploying apps, data portability, operational silos and other barriers create impediments when implementing a cohesive multicloud estate.

All of that complexity creates some frustrating and unproductive experience for IT professionals. The reality is that it is now a multicloud world with exponentially growing data and a dispersed nature, according to Shannon Champion (pictured), vice president of product marketing at Dell Technologies Inc.

“We know 92% of companies really identify as multicloud, meaning they’re in two or more public clouds, and they’re also investing in private cloud infrastructure,” she said. “In talking with customers, we’re seeing a consistent set of challenges emerge, which is keeping them from really innovating with multicloud.”

Champion spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Dave Vellante at the “Elevate Your Multicloud Experience With Dell APEX Navigator” event,  during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the challenges organizations are facing and available solutions. (* Disclosure below.)

The challenges at play

One of the challenges that rise to the top for companies is unpredictable costs. Dell often hears from customers that it’s very difficult to forecast budget requirements and plan when facing sporadic, unplanned cloud costs. A second challenge is management complexity, according to Champion.

“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,” she 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.”

All of that exacerbates the skills gap that organizations are still dealing with. They want to know how to make sure that their IT staff has the right skillsets and familiarity with tools in the public clouds they want to be in, according to Champion.

“The last thing I would say that we hear quite a bit is this concept of limited visibility,” she said. “Customers are struggling with getting a holistic view of everywhere their data lives, which is kind of scary and leads to security and compliance challenges.”

Problem-solving

Clearly, there are a number of challenges at play. To help customers solve those challenges, Dell points to APEX, which aims to remove the constraints of siloed cloud ecosystems and proprietary tools with a consolidated cloud management experience.

“APEX was created to deliver multicloud by design — a seamless, modern cloud and consumption experiences in all locations that bring simplicity, agility and control,” Champion said. “When you think about the APEX strategy, there’s really three main elements.”

The first element is helping customers go from ground-to-cloud. The company aims to do that with its enterprise-class storage software across block, file and data protection to the leading cloud providers, which it calls APEX Storage for Public Cloud.

“The second part is how we take those cloud ecosystems that our customers are choosing and bring them on-prem with consistency and control,” Champion added. “We’re doing that across the common cloud stacks on-prem with our new turnkey APEX Cloud Platforms.”

The third element is the company’s efforts to simplify multicloud experiences for companies. It aims to do that in a broad set of dedicated IT landscapes across the board with subscription and as-a-service offers, according to Champion.

“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,” she said.

The ground-to-cloud is delivered through the APEX Storage for Public Cloud family, which consists of two parts There’s the storage endpoints in the public cloud combined with consistent and centralized management.

“It’s a comprehensive set of storage services across block, file and data protection, which does set us apart in the comprehensive nature of the broad set of storage supported in the public cloud,” she said. “All of this creates a part of that universal storage layer, which is so important.”

Then, the company gives customers control, visibility and management of that universal storage layer via the software-as-a-service control plane. That gives organizations operational consistency from on-prem to public cloud, according to Champion.

“It gives them extreme performance and scalability so that they can confidently run those mission-critical applications and workloads in the cloud that they might not have been able to do before,” she said.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the “Elevate Your Multicloud Experience With Dell APEX Navigator” event:

(* 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