Over the past two years, the ways in which we work have undergone multiple changes. We rapidly moved through in-office work environments to nearly wholesale remote work, and now many of us find ourselves in some combination that allows us to work from nearly anywhere we choose.
As Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Technologies, pointed out in the opening keynote of this year’s Dell Technologies World, “The pandemic put an exclamation point on the importance of digital technology for everyone. Our PCs kept us connected and productive while working from anywhere.”
Chuck Whitten, Dell’s co-CEO, echoed Dell’s praise of the PC. “The PC has always been our most important productivity device. But in the past two years, it’s become something so much more,” he said. “This device is our workspace. It’s our telephony. It’s our videoconferencing equipment. It’s our shopping mall. And it’s our entertainment.”
Whitten also brought up the role technology has played in keeping employees engaged and satisfied. “In a world of hybrid work, and in the most competitive talent market in history, the PC has become a visible symbol of a company’s commitment to technology and to its employees. This is the gateway to the employee experience in hybrid work. Is my company giving me the best? Or am I going to find a company that will?”
MORE FROM BIZTECH: Learn how the right hardware can help keep employees engaged.
Why It’s Essential to Enable Work from Anywhere
On the second day of the event, Jen Felch, Dell’s CIO and chief digital officer, spoke about the shifting landscape of the workplace and the changes organizations must make to meet evolving employee expectations.
“The past two years have absolutely tested us. We needed to move 130,000 people to work from home, work from anywhere they choose, not just equip them with the right setup and access, but make sure that they had self-service capabilities to be effective in their jobs, to be productive,” Felch explained.
She also noted the adaptations IT departments had to make not only to enable remote work, but also to secure the data and workloads in this distributed environment. “The security landscape changed in ways we never imagined,” she said, adding that “the desire and need to transform our business functions only accelerated — it didn’t slow down at all.”
READ MORE: Find out what employees need for a seamless digital work experience.
All of these factors helped push Dell, among many other organizations, to accelerate a move to the cloud. And even the migration to the cloud has evolved, opening up now to include multicloud, on-premises, collocation and edge computing environments.
As Dell had noted in his earlier session, “The future is multicloud, with workloads and data flowing seamlessly across the entire environment.”
Dell Announces Updates to Improve Multicloud Services
Caitlin Gordon, vice president of product management at Dell, joined Felch onstage to add some insights on the concerns some organizations still have with moving to a multicloud environment. “First, they’re really struggling with managing their data across this distributed landscape that now spans their own data centers and multiple public clouds. They’re concerned about protecting their data. Ransomware attacks are a big concern. There is a real sense of urgency, of protecting and isolating their data. And third, and maybe most of all, they’re concerned about having the right people with the right skills to manage this increasing complexity.”
In the first two days of the event, Dell announced several projects and partnerships to address some of these concerns. Whitten introduced Dell APEX Cyber Recovery Services, “the first in a series of new APEX full-stack solutions that extends APEX beyond storage, compute and data protection. Dell APEX Cyber Recovery Services delivers an as-a-service experience with standardized configurations, simplified Dell-assisted recovery options and expertise from nearly 2,000 isolated vault solutions deployed globally.”
“Our customers want help reducing complexity and are seeking solutions that use a common approach to managing data wherever it lives — from public clouds, to the data center, to the edge,” Whitten said. And in a related press release, Dell announced the expansion of its data protection offerings to other public clouds, specifically Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.
And Gordon offered additional information about Dell’s recently announced Project Alpine. “Project Alpine is our initiative to bring our block, file and object storage software to all of the major public clouds. Our goal with Project Alpine is really to enable operational consistency, drive greater efficiency and simplify data mobility.”
Follow along with highlights from Dell Technologies World on our event page.
