The need to balance infrastructure development and storage spending
COVID-19 has placed pressure on every business in the world; forcing all departments, including IT, to cut costs and increase efficiency – often with reduced staff. But the rate of data growth continues to rise, outpacing the speed which businesses can make additional storage available. This makes it increasingly challenging for IT teams to deliver storage performance sufficient to match the needs of business-critical applications and the targets of stakeholders.
The data-growth squeeze
Even before the COVID-19, data growth was a priority for 45% of businesses leaders¹, even so, storage budgets are were only increasing at less than half the pace of data growth¹. But, lockdown came with a spike in demand for digital remote working which further accelerated data growth.
For businesses with infrastructure that lags behind data growth, the performance of their applications will continue to drop. Some businesses will look to the public cloud as the answer, but 90% of organizations report that over half of their IT workloads are business critical and must be located on premise².
Equally problematic is that scaling older storage infrastructures is out of the question for most businesses, as this comes with a high Capex price tag and lengthy implementation times. This puts IT teams in a difficult situation: they must deliver high performance storage without the budget or staff to scale their infrastructure.
Balancing the scales
Organizations must prioritize on value for money by enhancing existing on-premise storage technology and management tools that ensure performance keeps pace with business needs. Through intelligent storage modernization, this is possible without budget-breaking hardware investments.
By implementing modern All-Flash storage, such as Hitachi’s E990 Virtual Storage Platform, businesses are not only able to take advantage of lower running costs but can extract maximum value from their data. This enables them to take advantage of capabilities such as AI-Driven Management that reduces manual tasks by up to 70% and maximizes application performance – providing far superior cost efficiency.
Keeping control of costs
On the surface, implementing cutting edge storage technology to save money seems counter intuitive. However, with platforms like the Hitachi E990, not only are you saving on footprint, running costs and increasing the elevating the value of your data, but you’re also billed on a consumption basis.
This frees you from both high Capex and rigid billing structures and means you’re not paying for services you aren’t using. As the COVID-19 lockdown slowly lifts, this is incredibly valuable to many companies: firstly, because costs a priority; and secondly because it’s also likely that operations will still be spinning up and will require different levels of storage performance.
Edge Solutions
Data growth will only continue to outpace storage capacity. In order to meet performance and stakeholder expectations, enterprises must balance their infrastructure development with their storage spending.
At Edge Solutions, we work in partnership with Hitachi, combining our broad industry knowledge with Hitachi’s 30 years of expertise and enterprise-class storage technology to bring you a solution that ticks all the right boxes.
To find out how Edge Solutions can connect you with the Hitachi solutions that will help you maximize performance and future proof your storage capabilities, contact us to speak to one of our experts.