3 Ways to Make Storage a Strategic Asset for Your Organization (Not Just an IT Cost)

C-level executives are most interested in strategic assets and initiatives that will advance, transform, and grow their enterprises. They continually want to make “cost centers” more efficient and more cost-effective, while investing in what will accelerate, empower, and protect the business operations and its customer base.

Because data and digital technology have become so integral into any enterprise’s lifeblood, senior leadership teams must differentiate between the strategic aspects of IT and the tactical parts of IT cost centers. Storage has emerged in 2022 as a strategic asset that the C-suite, not just the CIO, can no longer overlook.

Enterprise storage can be used to improve your company’s cybersecurity, accelerate digital transformation, and reduce costs, while improving application and workload service levels. That’s going to get attention in the board room. Here’s how to equip yourself for that discussion with C-level executives. The following are three practical ways to make enterprise storage a strategic asset for your organization.

1. Make storage part of the corporate cybersecurity strategy

According to a Fortune 500 survey, 66% of Fortune 500 CEOs said their No. 1 concern in the next three years is cybersecurity. Similarly, in a KPMG CEO survey, CEOs also said cybersecurity is a top priority. The average number of days to identify and contain a data breach, according to security analysts, is 287 days. Given these facts, changing the paradigm from an overall corporate security perspective is needed.

Too many enterprises are not truly equipped and prepared to deal with it. Nonetheless, companies need to ensure that valuable corporate data is always available. This has created an urgent need for enterprises to modernize data protection and cyber resilient capabilities. The answer that CEOs, CIOs, CISOs and their IT teams need to take is an end-to-end approach to stay ahead of cybersecurity threats.

You need to think of your enterprise storage as part of your holistic corporate security strategy. This means that every possession in a company’s storage estate needs to be cyber resilient, designed to thwart ransomware, malware, internal cyber threats, and other potential attacks. Cybersecurity must go hand-in-hand with storage cyber resilience.

It’s prudent to evaluate the relationship across cybersecurity, storage, and cyber resilience. Both primary storage and secondary storage need to be protected, ranging from air gapping to real-time data encryption to immutable copies of your data to instantaneous recovery. 

What should you do? Perform a comprehensive analysis of your corporate data, determine what data needs to be encrypted and infused with cyber resilience and what doesn’t, and figure out how the protection needs to keep your company in compliance. You also need to decide what to do for modern data protection and you need to figure out what to do from a replication/snapshot perspective for disaster recovery and business continuity.

2. Use a hybrid cloud strategy to accelerate digital transformation

More than 75% of CIOs identified digital transformation as their top budget priority of the last year, according to Constellation Research. Companies are leveraging digital capabilities to better serve their customers, accelerate new products and services to market, and scale their operations. The growth and importance of data continue to proliferate exponentially.

The role of hybrid cloud infrastructure – part of your data on-premise – as the key enabler of this megatrend is at the forefront. A core value of cloud services is the support for digital transformation. Digital transformation is enabled and powered by hybrid cloud computing, offering increased flexibility, rapid application development and deployment, and consumption-based economics. This is essential to competing and remaining relevant in today’s world of data-driven business.

Data is the lifeblood of all modern enterprises. How to collect, manage, store, access, and use the data determines the level of success that a company will have. Enterprises can either innovate their data, or be strangled by the data, or even be held hostage for the data. This is why you need the strategy and the infrastructure to drive the future of data for your business.

As businesses evolve themselves digitally, a hybrid cloud strategy orchestrates all the different aspects of it in a mixed computing, storage, and services environment, comprised of on-premises infrastructure, private cloud services, and a public cloud such as AWS. Just in the last 18 months, advancements have been made for “on ramps” between private cloud and the public cloud. This hybrid cloud infrastructure becomes the cornerstone for an organization’s ability to be agile and accelerate business transformation.

3. Reduce IT costs

It can be challenging to identify areas in IT to reduce costs, while maintaining the level of service or capacity. But here’s a practical tip that can be a quick win for an enterprise: CIOs, CISOs and their IT teams can lower IT costs by consolidating storage arrays.

Because of the advancements in storage-defined storage technology, an enterprise can replace 50 arrays with two arrays, while still getting all the capacity, performance, availability, and reliability that are needed. This strategic consolidation saves on operational manpower, rack space, floor space, power expense, and cooling expense. In short, dramatically reducing your CAPEX and OPEX.

You can consolidate storage while, simultaneously, improving access to data across a hybrid cloud and a container-native environment for greater resilience, lower application and workload latency, and higher availability. For today’s enterprise requirements, 100% availability is a must.  

A hybrid cloud approach with a strong private cloud configuration creates the opportunity to consolidate storage arrays for maximum efficiency. Furthermore, with a private cloud, you have better, more exact control over cost structure and service level agreements (SLAs). Essentially, this strategy enables you to match an SLA, such as application performance and availability, with a higher level of control. 

Switching to consumption-based pricing models for storage is another way to reduce costs. Organizations can choose to flex up or flex down based on fluctuating needs for storage, utilizing storage-as-a-service. The worldwide analyst firm Gartner predicts: “by 2023, 43% of newly deployed storage capacity will be consumed as OPEX, up from less than 15% in 2020.”

Alternatively, companies can choose capacity on demand and seek out elastic pricing. All of these options have made storage more cost-effective. There are options across OPEX and CAPEX. You can even get a mix of OPEX and CAPEX to realize those cost savings.

Key takeaways

• Think of your storage as part of your holistic enterprise security strategy
• A hybrid cloud infrastructure should be the cornerstone for your organization’s ability to be agile and accelerate business transformation.
• Strategic consolidation of storage arrays reduces CAPEX and OPEX.

To learn more about enterprise storage solutions, visit Infinidat