“This is not your father’s data ecosystem” is the idea that cloud customers and big providers are still understanding and navigating the emerging world of computing. The days of data-in-a-box are gone. Now, customers are tasked with cobbling together different cloud services to meet their overall needs.

“It’s a horror, right? … What’s happening with data is it’s sprawling,” said Joe CaraDonna (pictured, left), vice president of engineering technology at Dell EMC. “You have them in data centers, you have them in cloud, you have them in multiple clouds, you have them in [software as a service] portals, you have it on file services and blog services, and how do you wrap your arms around that?”

CaraDonna and Bob Ganley (pictured, right), senior marketing consultant of the Cloud Business Unit at Dell EMC, spoke with Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS re:Invent event conference in Las Vegas. They discussed new tools that companies can use to manage complex cloud requirements when seeking or maintaining a cloud provider. (* Disclosure below.) 

How businesses can best optimize their cloud capability

The cloud ecosystem is evolving faster than organizational understanding of its implications. From the organization’s perspective it was simpler in the past.

“I bought a box and it had all the feature checklist that I wanted. Now, I need to put together all these microservices [to meet my data needs],” Miniman pointed out.

This concern is real and pressing, and organizations are asking themselves questions like: “Maybe I had my data born on-prem and I want to do my analytics in the cloud, how do I even wrap my hands around data sets?” CaraDonna stated.

As business data needs evolve, service providers are staying ahead of the curve with new tools to manage complex needs. Dell’s ClarityNow data management software allows customers to quickly navigate file and storage more easily in the cloud or on-prem. Users can find, access and manage data in almost real-time wherever it is located.

“It indexes billions of files and objects across our storage, across our cloud services, across Amazon S3, across third-party NAS systems as well, and you can get a single pane of glass to see where your files and your objects reside,” CaraDonna explained.

The “pane of glass” allows organizations to tag data and search within it. They can also create data sets using the search feature, tags and metadata. Once this is complete, they can then operate on those data sets. 

How Dell fits in the competitive cloud ecosystem

Cloud providers are also helping their customers by staying ahead of the innovation curve, and collaborating with other enterprise providers. Dell’s place in the ecosystem remains “multi-level stack.” The first layer is application, and the second is data. Naturally, the data has been the most pressing layer for customers. Dell’s mega merger with VMware has opened up some new and robust offerings to address bigger and bigger data transfers.

“So with VMware [we’re] focusing on enabling applications, whether they’re virtual machines or containerized now, being able to move those to the Cloud, move them on-prem.”

Dell’s focus on enhancing customer’s digital mobility is the same for data. To CaraDonna, applications are the easiest part of the stack to manage. Data is more difficult because “it’s just big; it’s hard to move,” he said.

The principles of data are the same whether in the cloud or on-prem, “where you still have to provide high availability, accessibility, security, capacity, and scale in the cloud as you would in the data center,”  CaraDonna added. To that end, Dell has focused on bringing its solutions range as a service to the cloud.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS re:Invent event. (*Disclosure: Dell EMC sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell EMC nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE