I recently undertook the task of having my family photos and movies digitized, including a few slides from Paris in 1965 that reminded me of the classic movie Casablanca.
At first, I thought I’d digitize everything myself, and I started looking into digitizing devices, but then I wondered whether these devices would provide the image clarity I was looking for and clean up some of the annoying dust and color distortions that happened over time.
I realized that I was better served trusting these memories to a service provider that focuses on these issues and has more powerful tools and devices than I can afford. And I realized that it was taking me a long time to do this analysis before I got anything digitized at all. With some of the 50’s films starting to decompose (beware the tell-tale vinegary odor), I knew I’d better turn to a specialist. The service I used did a great job, did the work quickly, and my family was delighted to see all of these images and films again.
It got me thinking about how businesses handle their enterprise data. How well do you understand which data is most important for your business stakeholders? How much time and energy are you spending with the management of underlying storage devices and infrastructure, making sure they’re up to date, available and have sufficient spare capacity? Wouldn’t that time be better spent managing the data and its meaning and value to the business?
If you’re rethinking how you manage your storage infrastructure, you’re not alone. Gartner® predicts that by “2025, 40% of newly procured premises-based storage will be consumed as a service, up from less than 10% in 2021.”*
With APEX Data Storage Services, Dell Technologies frees you from the daily burden of managing storage infrastructure. We take care of deploying the storage system (either at your premises or a colocation facility), activating the storage service that includes built-in buffer capacity, monitoring the environment, dealing with software patches and updates, and even providing you with recommendations to optimize your storage consumption through your APEX customer success manager.
In addition to these built-in capabilities, Dell Technologies has also introduced a set of Professional Services for APEX, to further extend the value of APEX to your business stakeholders. For APEX Data Storage Services, these include Data Migration Services, storage operations automation, storage operations integration and Residency Services.
Data Migration Services allow your business stakeholders to quickly gain the agility of APEX Data Storage Services by moving file and block data from legacy environments or public clouds. We’ve been helping IT organizations migrate data to accelerate the benefits of new storage infrastructure for years. Do you have data on older devices or disparate cloud sources that you’d like to manage more efficiently with the as-a-Service model of APEX Data Storage Services?
Many IT organizations are turning to automation to improve responsiveness to business stakeholder requests, but sometimes lack the experience with modern automation toolsets to automate their processes. With our storage operations automation, you can automate storage provisioning operations using infrastructure-as-code approaches with the experienced consultants of Dell Technologies Services.
While the simplicity of the APEX Console is a great way to present APEX Data Storage Services, many business stakeholders may prefer to consume these file and block services from their existing IT service portal. With storage operations integration capabilities from Dell Technologies Services, you can make APEX Data Storage Services for file and block storage visible and consumable in your existing ServiceNow IT service portal.
Many IT organizations are eager to shift their processes to a more agile model and see the value of APEX Data Storage Services to deliver such an as-a-Service foundation but lack the technical expertise for shifting storage operations to a more agile model. Our Residency Services provide technical experts to work alongside your IT organization as you make these operational changes. And our Education Services team have offers to help you understand APEX in more detail.
Reminiscent of a famous line from Casablanca, wouldn’t you like your business stakeholders, to turn to you and say “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship”? As you engage with your business stakeholders, who better to be your trusted storage-as-a-Service partner than the company that you trust already for your enterprise products, solutions and services: Dell Technologies?
*Gartner, “Predicts 2022: Driving Toward Digital Infrastructure Platforms,” by Thomas Bittman, Jonathan Forest, Hiroko Aoyama, Philip Dawson, and Bob Gill, 21 October 2021. Read the full report here.
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