Data Strategy Framework for Uncertain Economic Times

As the world deals with new challenges, leaders are evaluating their data-strategy frameworks and their ability to operate in a changing economic environment. Pure Storage® is no different. We’ve focused on making sure that our employees are safe and can care for their families while ensuring that we meet our customers’ needs. Our teams are doing amazing things to support critical industries, such as healthcare, government agencies, and communications, and challenged industries including travel and hospitality.

Our consulting and systems-integration partner ecosystem has reacted by providing analysis and solutions for data strategy framework to address new industry trends. For example:

• Accenture’s advice is to double down on digital commerce. They’ve upgraded it from a secondary channel and are advising executives on human resilience and how to support their teams.
• Atos identifies data as one thing that can outpace any epidemic, emphasizing that effective data sharing and analytics can make all the difference. Atos helped the City of Vienna implement an epidemic management system.
• DXC is providing services to help companies use data to advantage. Now is a great time to gain a better understanding and insights into many areas of business.
• HCL is advising clients on how to address the significant increase in people working from home and the rising pressure from cybersecurity threats.
• IBM has released AI-powered technologies to help the health and research community accelerate the discovery of medical insights and treatments.
• TCS scientists used AI to identify 31 molecules that hold promise toward drug discovery and has made distance learning a focus area with its iON Digital Glass Room.
• Wipro is advising clients to reinforce the durability of their supply chains with emerging technologies such as 3D printing, blockchain, IoT, and automation.

In speaking with systems integration partners and customers about current industry and technology trends, I’ve observed patterns that are familiar to us at Pure. These include:

• Digital transformation and multicloud architectures require data to be portable
• Distributed operations are increasing the vulnerability of data
• Businesses are looking at their data to answer new questions and obtain better insight
• Businesses need more flexibility to address infrastructure costs

Focus on Data Portability

To act with agility as your staff and customers operate in changing ways, your business processes need to utilise data much more flexibly.

Modern businesses have built processes to operate on digital platforms underpinned by software-as-a-service (SaaS) and public-cloud services, thereby simplifying access from anywhere. But legacy companies rely mainly on applications and infrastructure that weren’t architected to support large-scale remote or direct customer access. Many enterprises are reviewing their cloud strategies and attempting to accelerate digital transformations to pivot to digital channels and supply chains. Data gravity can obstruct digital transformation as it can be slow and expensive to move data in bulk to the right place at the right time.

Pure Storage technologies overcome data gravity and significantly increase data portability. Pure’s best-in-class data-reduction technology means you have less data to move when migrating from core data centres to the cloud. Pure’s elegant data-replication and data-migration technologies make it extremely efficient to move data safely without disruption or downtime. Pure’s software environment operates consistently in a multicloud architecture using the same APIs and functionality whether in a private cloud, AWS, or Azure (beta). Pure also supports application portability in the form of persistent data volumes for containers, freeing up stateful applications to move between edge, core, and cloud as seamlessly as stateless applications.

Focus on Data Protection

Ransomware threats are top of mind for CISOs, CROs, and the rest of the C-suite as they need their networks to be more open for remote working and the continuing increase in business through digital channels. Ransomware attackers seek out and encrypt all of a business’s data and backups, then demand a fee to unlock it. The vast cost of operational downtime forces many companies to comply.

Pure Storage has developed an immutable data store that cannot be encrypted by ransomware attackers, even by a compromised storage admin account. The data store is held on an extremely fast parallel platform that allows quick recovery of data and restoration in minutes or hours, as opposed to days or weeks.

Focus on Business Insight

The changing economic environment requires business leaders to make rapid strategic decisions. There are new questions about how business processes can function without people being physically on-site. Gaining the greatest business insight—whether by structured data queries, Monte Carlo simulations, or machine learning—requires quick access to the maximum amount of high-quality data.

Data silos are commonplace whether your business is legacy-based or architected in a modern cloud-centric manner. Enterprise architecture should be data-centric to support business processes, but most companies have application- or cloud-centric architectures. Both distribute data in myriad disparate systems and data stores.

Pure has developed a data platform with the performance and parallelism needed to support multiple applications accessing data in one place. It’s architected to cope with the simultaneous demands of online queries, search, real-time data streaming, and machine learning. When you have new questions to ask of your data, it’s simple and performant to add a new lens on that single data hub to gain new perspectives or look for anomalies that bring greater insight.

Focus on Financial Flexibility

The economic climate has changed dramatically for many industries. Companies are taking significant action to manage costs as their revenues shift. As staffing costs tend to be the most flexible, companies are laying off or furloughing employees. Technology infrastructure costs tend to be tied to CAPEX or are otherwise inflexible to address changes to demand and consumption.

Pure Storage customers using the Pure as-a-Service utility OPEX model can reduce their costs in line with consumption. Therefore, if you don’t need data during a business downturn, you can archive it and Pure’s data platform costs will reduce accordingly. Pure also has technologies to reduce AWS and Azure cloud-storage bills by up to 75%, which helps control costs as digital channel demands increase with remote operations.

Evolve Your Thinking

No matter the business climate, you’re always considering your strategy. Recent events and the resulting changes in markets and business make it especially important to look at how you manage and leverage data. Pure and its partners can help you identify the right solutions to better position your business for growth and acceleration.