EMC Lines Up Behind Dimension Data in the Cloud

How to Keep Your Cloud Technologies Secure

Given the cost and complexity of standing up a private cloud these days, there’s been a marked shift toward more reliance on IT service providers that will absorb the capital costs associated with establishing a modern data center on behalf of multiple customers. As a result, IT vendors are either building up their own managed hosting capabilities or relying more on third-party partners.

In the case of EMC, the decision has been made to go the latter route via a Catalyst Alliance program under which EMC and Dimension Data, a unit of the NTT Group, will more closely align their private and public cloud computing efforts to create a comprehensive set of hybrid cloud computing services aimed primarily at midmarket IT customers.

Kevin Leahy, general manager for the data center business unit at Dimension Data, says that rather than focusing on managing IT infrastructure, CIOs are clearly now more interested in unlocking the business value of the applications riding on top of the infrastructure. Partnering with an IT services provider such as Dimension Data, says Leahy, makes it possible for organizations to take advantage of a modern IT environment running on premise, in a hosting facility or in a public cloud much faster.

For its part, Jay Snyder, senior vice president for global alliances at EMC, says the relationship with Dimension Data is unique in that both EMC and its reseller partners will be driving application workloads to IT environments managed by Dimension Data. The individual characteristics of those workloads will ultimately determine where they wind up running in a cloud computing environment, says Snyder.

The degree to which IT organizations will outsource management of IT infrastructure still remains to be seen. But there’s also no doubt that enterprise IT organizations have taken note of the agility provided by public cloud service providers. Now many of them want that same level of agility applied to a private cloud that comes with an IT organization to also manage it on their behalf.