Dell Technologies' Cloud Console control layer to manage the future of hybrid cloud

Dell Technologies on Wednesday made a handful of announcements that play into its strategy of moving all of its products to an as-a-service model. One of the announcements was Cloud Console, a service that aims to be the control layer for on-premise, multi-cloud, and edge deployments.

Speaking with media, Sam Grocott, senior vice president of Dell Technologies business units marketing, touted Cloud Console as a new online platform that "delivers a unified and seamless experience for customers to manage their entire cloud and as-a-service journey".

"With just a few clicks customers will be able to browse a marketplace of cloud products, services, and solutions and then order, buy, and transact a service or solution your business needs," he said.

"Customers are going to be able to deploy workloads and manage their multi-cloud resources all through a single pane of glass and monitor the cost in real time and add cloud and as-a-service solutions just with a few short clicks."

Cloud Console is in public preview for a handful of the company's customers from Wednesday.

"The world has decided it is a hybrid cloud and it is a multi-cloud world. So whether it's multiple public clouds, multiple cloud partners across a hybrid environment … that's the future and the reality. It's not going to be one way or the other, it's all ways," Grocott said.

See also: Top cloud providers in 2020: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, hybrid, SaaS players

But to Grocott, many challenges that customers are faced with in a hybrid cloud world come down to the control point.

"As an organisation, do you want to maintain the control point and make sure that you've got control over all of the decisions and priorities of how your infrastructure is being deployed, managed, and utilised on a day to day basis?" he said.

"If you go with a public cloud provider, you give up a lot of that control because they're going to manage that in a broader, more homogenous environment. If you maintain that control, the question is how do you, within your environment, how do you still get the advantages of public cloud whilst maintaining control of your infrastructure?"

Through Cloud Console, Grocott said if a workload is moved from on-premises to off-premises, customers would not need to launch a different tool, use a different operating environment, or learn different systems.

"That consistent operating experience, whether you're on Azure or Google or AWS or any of the large-scale public cloud providers … you maintain that experience," he explained. "You don't lose control and you don't create that complexity of having a disjointed multi-tool, multi-infrastructure management set of tools.

"It's all done with one toolset."

Dell Technologies has plans to expand Cloud Console capabilities over time, across any of the company's partner clouds -- there's currently 4,200 partner cloud providers.

"We will build in APIs, we will build in that consistent operating experience to move workloads," he added.

"For example, if you're running our Dell Technologies Cloud Platform and it's being managed underneath the Cloud Console, if you want to move a workload or application to AWS or to Azure or Google, you simply migrate that workload through the VMware VCF Cloud Operating tools ... and when you do that, you don't lose control over the data and application and you don't create a different operating model, you can simply move that workload back."

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