Death, taxes… and storage growth. They’re inevitable.
Many enterprises view data storage as part of the cost of doing business. They don’t see it as a revenue driver or a strategic asset, but as a necessity in a world where data is doubling every two years. That’s an understandable perspective when storage just seems to grow and nobody really knows how to control it. I offer a different perspective. I believe that all data, including its growth, has the potential to be an enterprise’s biggest differentiator in the market.
We all understand that the point of data storage is really the information in it. Going forward, the value of data in an organization will be increasingly aligned to analytics. The rise of big data in recent years marked a turning point in the industry as enterprises discovered new ways to draw insights from massive amounts of data and use those insights to improve their business in real time. Now, with the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) and machine learning, our abilities to convert our data into information has even greater potential to transform the enterprise.
Yet too many enterprises see data as something to be stored, rather than a tool to help them soar.
Oftentimes, a customer will approach me and say, We need this much storage capacity and we have this much to spend. That’s not a storage strategy so much as storage triage. We encourage enterprises to look at their storage investments in terms of the business returns they can expect on that investment. If your storage strategy isn’t focused on creating more value from your data, it’s not really helping your business.
What does a successful data strategy look like? It starts with bringing the right people into your business to help you answer the tough questions:
- How can we organize our data to get more value from it?
- How are we delivering information to our organization?
- How can we ensure information is readily available to the business regardless of threat events such as ransomware, security breaches and equipment failure?
While cost is an important component in maximizing your storage ROI, it’s important to look beyond price per gigabyte.
For example, what does it cost your business when mission-critical data is inaccessible for three hours? What about three days? Or consider how much time your IT department spends provisioning the storage settings on its virtual machines, could automating that process save you time that could be used for other projects that drive innovation in your business? Or, when a cyber attack strikes in the middle of the night, can automation help you recover quickly and keep your business running when your IT team is sleeping?
At Advizex, we’ve developed a repeatable process that helps enterprises identify and invest in data storage solutions that boost their bottom line and protect their business. We call it Storage Advizer, and it will change the way you see data storage for the better. Storage Advizer examines how data storage impacts your business and aligns storage investments with strategic imperatives such as operational resilience, real-time analytics and data privacy/compliance.
Once our experts have developed a strategic roadmap for your data storage, we ring in the latest technology to fill your gaps, whether that’s flash-based appliances, hyperconverged systems, cloud solutions or other technologies. Working with leading storage partners like HPE, we can help businesses build a storage infrastructure that is cost-efficient, powerful, flexible and secure.
If you’re not automating your data storage infrastructure or using real-time reporting and analytics to manage your data, Advizex and HPE can help give you a better perspective on your storage strategy. To learn more, download our free eBook, Is Your Data Storage Strategy Holding You Back or Helping You Soar?