Over the years, many organizations have grown their IT infrastructure mix to include a combination of on-premises datacenters, public clouds, colocations and edge locations. This sprawl has become difficult to effectively manage and optimize. A recent ESG survey found that 82% of organizations struggle to properly size workloads for the optimal infrastructure environment.¹ KPMG also found that 67% of senior technology leaders at U.S. firms say they have yet to see a significant return on cloud investments², further exemplifying the need to determine optimal workload placement across environments, whether they’re on- or off-premises. IT leaders want solutions that can optimize the balance of cost, technical capability, interoperability, security and other key dimensions.
The Challenges with Suboptimal Workload Placement
For many organizations, workloads designed for on-premises were containerized and rehosted in the public cloud but not refactored, therefore missing many key public cloud benefits. For others, workloads were refactored or built for a specific public cloud, but the workload and organization’s needs evolved over time, and now the workload may be better suited for a different location – on a different public cloud or back on-premises. Many of these organizations are now also finding it challenging to migrate workloads that were optimized to run in a specific location.
Additionally, many organizations don’t have full visibility into their infrastructure, due to various teams spinning up their own workloads in environments without central IT awareness, making it difficult to allocate resources efficiently. As a result, workloads may not efficiently connect with one another, resulting in increased costs, reduced performance and potential security risks.
Workload placement decisions must also factor in data protection regulations and privacy requirements, especially when dealing with multicloud and hybrid environments that cross international borders. Failure to comply with these requirements can result in significant penalties and reputational damage.
In some cases, it might even be necessary to repatriate traditional workloads to meet performance, cost and compliance mandates. Thus, organizations must consider a range of factors when placing and optimizing workloads.
Benefits of Optimally Placed Workloads
Organizations can leverage the multiplatform consistency and transparency of Dell APEX, as well as its public cloud-like experiences across environments, to ensure workloads are placed where they will provide the greatest value to their business. As a result, organizations can benefit from improved cost efficiency, productivity and digital resiliency, and can accelerate their businesses.
-
- Cost optimization. Aligning workloads to optimal environments makes it possible to use resources more efficiently, whether that’s on-premises or in the public cloud. This helps reduce both operational and capital expense, minimizes the need for overprovisioning and avoids unnecessary resource consumption. By ensuring that workloads are running on the most cost-effective infrastructure, organizations can significantly reduce costs for their business. Given the high cost of capital, shifting to a subscription or as-a-Service model can also help address cost challenges. An IDC report, commissioned by Dell, found organizations leveraging Dell APEX can see up to a 39% lower three-year cost of operations.³
- Productivity. Dell APEX allows organizations to leverage existing skillsets rather than having to learn how to refactor workloads for multiple on-premises and off-premises environments. Dell APEX also allows organizations to offload infrastructure management. These benefits free up IT time to focus on other important tasks, such as developing new applications, improving existing ones or managing security. In addition, by optimizing workload placement, organizations can reduce latency and increase application responsiveness, which in turn improves the end-user experience and overall productivity. The IDC study found IT infrastructure staff can achieve up to 38% more efficiency with Dell APEX.³
- Digital resilience. Organizations can improve digital resilience by ensuring workloads are running on the most appropriate infrastructure, without having to worry about interoperability challenges. APEX allows IT to scale infrastructure as business needs evolve, back up and secure data and monitor as needed and help monitor and recover from attacks and outages. This helps maintain high levels of uptime and minimizes downtime, which is crucial for modern organizations relying on digital systems for their operations. The IDC study found Dell APEX helped reduce unplanned outages by up to 64% per year.³
- Business acceleration. By optimizing workload performance in environments that fit best for the workload and by provisioning IT services quickly, IT teams leveraging Dell APEX can help businesses respond quickly to changes in the market or customer needs. This agility is essential for maintaining a competitive edge, as it allows companies to rapidly scale their operations, launch new products or enter new markets. The IDC study found Dell APEX can help organizations achieve up to 12% faster development lifecycles.³
Dell APEX is a portfolio of subscription-based technology solutions that delivers the simplicity and agility of the cloud experience, while providing more control over apps and data. The portfolio helps organizations embrace a multicloud by design approach, which includes leveraging partners across the multicloud ecosystem without being locked into siloed systems. A multicloud by design strategy brings management consistency to storing, protecting and securing data wherever organizations need the data to live. And it means extending cloud stacks to on-premises datacenters, colocation facilities and the edge, so organizations can run workloads according to business needs, not technical constraints.
Organizations considering how to optimize their workload placement can leverage Dell APEX to help them align workloads based on technical and business parameters. Dell APEX can help deliver business value by helping reduce costs, improving productivity, increasing digital resiliency and accelerating business growth. By automating resource allocation and ensuring workloads run on the most suitable infrastructure, with options to offload infrastructure management, Dell APEX helps enable a more efficient and agile IT environment. To learn more about how to drive value for your business, visit Business Value of Dell APEX.
1 From a Dell sponsored ESG study Multi-cloud Application Deployment and Delivery Decision Making, February 2023.
2 From a KPMG S. Technology Survey Report: Digital to the core, 2022.
3 Based on an IDC White Paper commissioned by Dell Technologies and Intel: The Business Value of APEX as a Service Solutions, August 2021.
