Solving 3 key IT challenges to unlock business innovation

CIOs live it every day. The pace of technological change is lightning-fast. Savvy CIOs navigate this by learning, deciding and taking action with incredible agility and speed. To do that, IT leaders must architect IT infrastructure that enables cloud-like agility and speed across diverse environments.

But they can’t go it alone. That’s because there are challenges that require an ecosystem of capabilities to solve—for example, complexity at the edge, diverse legacy systems, resource requirements and ongoing concerns about security, governance and consistency.

That’s why Dell Technologies and Microsoft are collaborating with customers to solve the most pressing issues CIOs are facing today. The goal is to unlock innovation and ladder up business outcomes, by combining Dell Technologies’ leadership in infrastructure platforms and management with Microsoft’s expertise in cloud services and enterprise software.

Top CIO challenges by the numbers

Let’s look at three major IT priorities, tasked with driving improved business outcomes. 

CIOs are asked to provide new and innovative applications and services at an increasingly rapid pace. These new capabilities help businesses optimize their operations, remain competitive, and be more agile/responsive to address and capitalize on change. They are adopting DevOps methodologies and containerized app architectures to deliver on this new mandate. According to Gartner, “90% of global enterprises will run applications in containerized production by 2026.”

Organizations are embracing the edge, moving data collection, analysis, and applications from data centers to edge locations. Flexera estimates that 50% of infrastructure will be deployed at the edge by 2025. CIOs have an opportunity to address how and where applications and data will be generated, analyzed and used everywhere throughout an organization including the edge, data center or cloud.

When it comes to cloud locations, per IDC, 92% of organizations deploy a multi-cloud strategy. As a result, organizations need a way to flexibly and concurrently utilize the private cloud, public cloud and on-premises resources. This means putting the right workload where it belongs, optimizing performance and being able to manage the entire environment securely.

Answering pressing IT needs

Together, Dell Technologies and Microsoft collaborate to answer the most pressing IT needs. Increasingly, IT is the foundational lever to business innovation and CIOs need IT modernization to unlock that innovation. The Dell Technologies and Microsoft collaboration helps:

1. Accelerate application modernization by optimizing the delivery of Arc-enabled hybrid services across the customer IT landscape (as discussed here).
2. Simplify the edge by optimizing infrastructure for the edge and integrating infrastructure with Azure management and governance services so customers can centrally manage and secure distributed Azure deployments via Azure Portal.
3. Deliver a consistent Azure hybrid cloud experience across locations and deployments by enabling deep cross-layer integrations and full-stack automation between our respective technology stacks. This simplifies operations and delivers predictable outcomes while empowering customers to use familiar tools like WAC and Azure Portal.

Our collaboration is guided by capabilities in these three areas:

Bridging the cloud divide

The goals: 

• To provide a consistent, seamless operational experience through centralized management of hybrid cloud environments. 
• To accelerate time to value with turnkey, automated IT infrastructure.

Unleashing application value

The goals: 

• To easily adopt app modernization technologies
• To optimize for on-demand services
• To gain programmability for simpler DevOps and app workflows

Hardening security and governance

The goals: 

• To consistently access, secure and govern on-premises resources
• To improve security posture with immediately available patches and updates
• To protect sensitive workloads and datasets with zero trust infrastructure 

Moving ahead

In the face of accelerating IT change, two technology leaders are bringing together their collective strengths to help customers around the world. The collective goal is to help organizations unlock innovation, modernize IT and optimize hybrid cloud operations — all within the lightning-fast pace of technological change. 

Read this Enterprise Strategy Group showcase that discusses hybrid cloud priorities and how Dell and Microsoft are collaborating to help customers on their cloud journey