Three-point guide to make your storage infrastructure future-proof

Market dynamics are no longer what they used to be a few years ago. The dynamics continue to evolve at a breakneck pace since the businesses of today are more focused on looking out for newer opportunities to innovate and provide the best in class experience to their customers;  the driving force behind this entire rhythm being technology. 

Moreover, mainly due to the ongoing data explosion and the urgent need to securely extract insights from it, the conversations around digital and IT transformation have accelerated. All of this has forced many businesses to take a re-look at their IT infrastructure as well. Organizations therefore need to be sure they have the potential to not just store, but also process and analyze the data. 

Hence, demand for data storage will skyrocket in the near future.

India is rapidly catching up to this trend as well. This is because the private and the government sectors are generating significant amounts of data. As per a study conducted by Vanson Bourne, India saw 130% growth of data in 2016-2018. Additionally, IDC says that the external storage market in India had witnessed a growth of 6% YOY, standing at $91 million in Q4 2019. 

The catalyst here is the government's aggressive push towards complete digitalization along with the launch of several e-governance projects. Moreover, in the recent past, we have seen several business conglomerates and technology giants set up their local data centers, which has also provided a push to the data storage landscape in India. 

So, to navigate through the next data era and successfully manage and store data, organizations need to adhere to three key essentials while modernizing their IT infrastructure.

1. Data-centric design to foster innovation

It’s time to move away from the legacy IT architectural design and incorporate a new data-centric approach that will eliminate traditional tradeoffs in performance and deliver agility. The new data centric design will provide unparalleled flexibility to organizations to complement their existing investment while keeping pace with new investments. Moreover, it will help IT teams to manage any workload across the platforms, optimize, and scale -- up the performance without any complexities. 

2. Bring in IT simplicity and more intelligence

Customers nowadays are demanding IT architectures that can deliver unprecedented levels of intelligence and automation. Hence, your storage infrastructure should also be an intelligent one, i.e. can provide end to end automation and streamline IT with built-in machine learning. The intelligent automation system will simplify management and optimize system resources while enabling proactive health analytics. With the smart monitoring process, it will also help in reducing risk and predict the future needs. 

3. Embrace adaptability

Lastly, organizations are expecting flexibility as they transform and take advantage of public cloud offerings, deploy in edge or corporate data centers, and expand storage for private cloud infrastructure. Thus, your storage infrastructure needs to be adaptable, i.e. it should be flexible in terms of architecture, deployment, and consumptions and should enable application mobility from edge to core, to the cloud without disruption. 

While navigating through the current times, we have all observed that organizations, which were digitally transformed and had stronger IT systems, were better equipped to navigate through these difficult times than those who weren’t. This phase has taught all of us many lessons. One of the most important ones is that technology has and will continue to play a crucial role in driving human and business progress. 

Therefore, it has become an utmost priority for businesses today to adopt stronger IT foundations that are intelligent, cost-effective, and that can break down fences of their progress. The future of storage is unfolding and now it’s time to see if the organizations are ready to sail this boat.

Amit Luthra

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Amit Luthra is the Director and General Manager of Storage Platforms and Solutions at Dell Technologies, India.