Just a few years ago, people discussed whether they needed to migrate to the cloud. But now, there is much less trepidation about shifting to the cloud because it has become a normal and certainly resourceful element of enterprise IT. Due to the many benefits of the cloud, the question has shifted to, “which clouds should I use, and for which workloads”?

The multi-cloud approach, where organisations use a number of different clouds, public and private, each to fulfil unique requirements, has quickly gained popularity over the years. What’s revolutionary about this approach is that it gives businesses much greater freedom of choice when it comes to delivering IT services and infrastructure for business operations.

Remember the famous ad which said, “There’s an app for that”? when smartphones were on the rise? These days, just think of any business function that you would like to carry out or ways you would like to work with data and chances are, “There’s a cloud solution for that”.

By using multiple clouds, you can pick and choose the best solutions at service levels and price points that suit your business needs. Best of all, you won’t be locked in to only employ the services of a select few vendors for it all to “work” without a hitch. This was a problem that many businesses had to accept during the early days of IT.

As companies continue to proceed with their cloud journey, it’s important to remember that the on-premises data centre will continue to be an integral part of IT for many organisations. It serves as the bedrock or foundation for many of the changes we are seeing in IT, even as businesses go increasingly multi-cloud.

The on-premise data centre holds the infrastructure that provides businesses with the much-needed capabilities to analyse, protect and leverage data effectively. In fact, global IT leaders Dell Technologies and Intel Corporation reported that “organisations with trusted data centres experience very real and quantifiable business and technology outcomes that give them the edge and agility to win in today’s highly competitive marketplace”.

The report goes on to highlight the following best practices of trusted data centres, spanning different aspects of infrastructure, security and data protection:

• Their infrastructure should be refreshed/retired regularly, with storage and servers being replaced in less than 3 years.

• The infrastructure must be inherently secure, or secure by design, with the encryption of sensitive data being a common practice.

• Trusted technologies are used throughout and sensitive data are always replicated to secondary systems.

This does not address the challenge of complexity in managing all the different on-prem and cloud environments. However, once the data centre can be fully trusted, companies can work on ensuring that they have a consistent experience and are able to manage their whole infrastructure, whether it resides in the core, or in multiple clouds.

To find out more on how Dell can help your business build a strong and trusted data centre foundation, as well as consistency across clouds, click here.