Leverage managed STaaS cloudification strategies to eliminate storage hardware administration and support costs
The situation’s low-down
Storage as a service (STaaS) services are next on Infrastructure & Operations (I&O) leaders’ agenda as costly capital expenditure processes are forcing them to seek alternative modes. Recent STaaS market entrants and programs include Dell Technologies Project Apex, NetApp Keystone, Hitachi Vantara EverFlex, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) GreenLake, Pure Storage Pure as-a-Service.
Hopping over to STaaS now is a good decisive move for Gartner expects managed, consumption-based storage systems and hybrid IT will be the foundation for more than 70% of corporate business storage workloads by 2025. Moving forth with hybrid cloud strategies, hybrid IT — the blend of traditional services, public and private cloud services into a singular IT environment — will dominate the landscape.
Recommendations for optimising STaaS cloudification
- Embracing cloudification necessitates a strong automation foundation, knowledge of how software works “higher up the stack,” and cloud-enabled business model results.
- Upskill the I&O team’s internal competency with cloud-native capabilities by hiring or training professionals with the know-how.
- Unlock IT innovation by refocusing IT resources and skills to high-value yielding platform services and customer centricity initiatives. Automating repetitive tasks also frees up time for deriving insightful strategies offered by AI predictive platforms.
- Understand IT storage administration and support activities. Data volume is directly proportional to administrative workload. A way around is by outsourcing processes to a flexible, service-based model invested in artificial intelligence for IT operations.
Why switch to STaaS now
The disrupted growth of the last 2 years isn’t entirely over. Yet another wave will disrupt capital plans. Shifting to a managed STaaS platform service delivery model will avoid any shortfalls in capacity through this uncertain growth period.
The past 2 years has thrown, or at least shown organisations that outdated IT methods ought to be tossed out. Entrenched and no longer relevant financial resource management of IT expenditure are in a similar situation.
Financial engineering inefficiencies, such as capital productivity, risk management, and contingency planning, have the potential to undercut cost optimization efforts and harm long-term capital projects.
By replacing storage capital expenditure activities with managed STaaS, I&O leaders can deliver productivity gains and unlock business innovation. The relative cost per raw gigabyte of performant storage ($/GB-IOPS) is predicted to fall throughout this period as more organisations utilise cloud solutions. However, as a fraction of overall $/GB-IOPS, on-premises storage management and support prices are rising. Retaining on-premises data centres is thus a cost ineffective measure. Cloudification is the informed way forward.