Dell/Virtustream: Enterprises Pushing Mission-Critical Workloads to the Cloud

In the early days of cloud, enterprises were comfortable migrating some of their applications, but they kept mission-critical workloads and sensitive data on-premises and behind the firewall, concerned about such issues as security, privacy, control and compliance.

That’s changing, however, with the ongoing maturation of cloud computing and the rising adoption of hybrid cloud and multicloud strategies by enterprises, according to a study conducted by Forrester Research analysts.

The report, Multicloud Strategies Drive Mission-Critical Benefits, commissioned by Virtustream, a cloud company owned by Dell Technologies, found using multiple cloud providers gives organizations the options and flexibility they need to find the right environments for their mission-critical applications, even if that means adding more complexity to the picture. The survey found that almost all (97 percent) of the 719 respondents said that migrating mission-critical applications was part of their multicloud strategies.

“Simply put, enterprises leverage multiple cloud platforms to meet their cloud architectural requirements,” the Forrester analysts wrote in the report. “Not only does this study reinforce this, but it also overwhelmingly shows that enterprise multicloud strategies include organizations’ mission-critical applications worldwide.”

That mirrors what Rory Read is seeing. Read wears a few different hats at Dell, including executive vice president and chief operating executive at Dell and president and CEO of Virtustream, which was founded a decade ago with the idea of hosting enterprises’ most complex and mission-critical workloads in the cloud. The company, which came to Dell when the tech giant bought EMC for more than $60 billion in 2016, now finds that almost 70 percent of its business involves hosting SAP applications for customers.

Dell/Virtustream’s Rory Read

“The issues that customers had in the earlier years, back three or four years ago, they were very concerned about bringing mission-critical apps to the cloud because of the risk,” Read told Channel Futures in an interview during the recent Dell Technologies World show in Las Vegas. “It wasn’t a problem to move development workloads or things like that, but as it worked around mission-critical, they wanted to make sure they had a solution, because if these don’t work, their businesses take fundamental issues.”

Enterprises define “mission critical” a number of ways, according to the Forrester report. The most common are ERP applications that store customer and financial data and those that are critical to completing sale and e-commerce transactions, employee productivity and customer experience. Embracing multicloud strategies fits with what enterprises are looking for when considering migrating these applications.

“Diverse applications require a long list of unique requirements, and leveraging multiple sourcing options can create strategic advantage,” the authors wrote. “Using multiple clouds … allows organizations to optimize across their portfolios. Sometimes, this is for simple use cases, like backup and recovery of data. … But usually, multicloud serves a larger purpose by providing …