Every day we all experience the impact of cloud, mobile, social, big data and how these megatrends are redefining entire industries. Names like Uber, Nest, Pebble and Netflix have replaced Yellow Cab, Westinghouse, Timex and Blockbuster in our lexicon. At the center of much of this disruption is IT. Vendors everywhere, including EMC, are imploring customers to transform or risk becoming one of the disrupted.
The challenge most customers face is how to simultaneously manage today’s business, aka “keeping the lights on,” while innovating for the future. To do this, they need to reduce cost and complexity within their traditional infrastructure in order to free up capital and resources to invest in new business models and sources of revenue. The proverbial “changing the tires on a car while driving.” This is a major pain point for CIOs everywhere.
It’s really a tale of two worlds. The first is characterized by traditional apps, being IT-centric and on premise. The second is defined by new next-gen apps, being developer-centric and living in the cloud.
For IT to successfully transform and to stay in control, these worlds can’t become separate silos. The problem is that they will remain separate unless we start thinking of them as working hand-in-hand.
This can be an incredibly complex process for our customers and it can’t happen overnight. How do you achieve both the trust to support the millions of legacy applications on which the business runs today, and the agility you need to move forward toward new digital era applications? Where do you start?
We think there are three steps that every customer can take today to ensure that they are headed in the right direction:
1. Simplify and automate storage.
2. Leverage the cloud where it makes sense
3. Protect data, regardless of where it’s located
First, let’s look at storage. The choice of storage platform is driven by workloads, based on a combination of performance, capacity, data service requirements and price. Due to the fact that these dimensions can vary widely, it’s both the reason there is no “one-size-fits-all” storage solution and why almost all customers have multiple storage platforms. Whether it’s flash, hybrid, scale-out, protection or commodity, choice in storage should not mean more headaches. Storage can be drastically simplified and automated by using software to centralize, optimize and manage all your service level objectives and data services across your environment. Now customers can drive out cost and complexity which in turn allows them to redirect resources in other more impactful areas of the business.
Second, customers need a path to the cloud. OK, so maybe this is not an earth shattering revelation but while a vast majority of customers will have a cloud strategy this year, nearly all of them will tell you that their cloud strategies are still maturing. Meaning they are still feeling out which workloads are the best fit. Enabling the cloud as an integrated component of the infrastructure makes it easier to accelerate the process of taking advantage of cloud use cases that make the most sense for their respective businesses. Whether that’s as a storage tier, for protection services, retention requirements or to develop and deliver new applications. Having a cloud storage strategy has become table stakes for businesses
And finally, data protection should be everywhere! Really this is not as straightforward as many might think. Between massive data growth, data mobility and changing lifecycles, customers need to be assured that all their data is protected regardless of where it may be at that moment, wherever it might move and at the right service level over its entire lifecycle. Moreover, much like primary storage, data protection should be delivered as a set of services with varying protection levels that can be provisioned on demand. Taking a holistic view of data protection will ensure customers have the confidence to accelerate their transformation and help manage risk.
Bringing these capabilities together as a set of integrated, services can really be thought of as a converged storage infrastructure; ensuring optimal application and workload performance, cloud enablement and comprehensive data protection. All things customers need to keep their business moving full steam ahead.
