How CFOs Accelerate Modernization with a Cloud-like Data Platform

CFOs have a lot on their plates these days and a lot to balance: CAPEX budgets shrinking, operational risks increasing, inherent flexibility decreasing, and digital-transformation investments looming. However, with challenge comes opportunity and a significant opportunity to change past behaviors.

The Pure Storage data platform, along with Evergreen//One™, brings financial and operational flexibility to a former cost center: data infrastructure. By applying a cloud operating model to data infrastructures, Pure can help CFOs and IT eliminate technical debt, keep systems current, embrace navigational course corrections, and focus on strategic initiatives while still responding to the day-to-day needs of the enterprise.

Get What Your Organization Needs—Anytime, Anywhere

Many CFOs want to purchase services the same way they sell them—on-demand with a low commitment to start and the ability to grow as you go. The usership economy is gaining ground in all traditional IT infrastructure areas, and the benefits are clear: You’re consuming a service with the flexibility to pay as you go. In this case, it’s storage as a service.

Research shows that many CIOs feel cloud-like consumption models significantly accelerate digital transformation due to the transparency and agility to repurpose capital to address business demand.

Evergreen//One provides a cloud operating model for block, file, and object storage services, both on-premises or in the cloud. It offers a flexible consumption model and nonstop services across all areas of your storage environment. Pure’s Evergreen™ technology enables us to manage the underlying hardware or cloud software needed to deliver service-level agreements (SLAs), across hybrid and public clouds.

Learn about Evergreen SLAs for Ransomware Recovery and Energy Efficiency

The Pure Storage Data Platform: A Simple and Unified Experience

We’ve simplified procurement even further by using one contract for our storage-as-a-service solution, regardless of where you choose to deploy. You can start as low as 50 TiB and scale to petabytes under the same subscription term. Evergreen//One is not a utility—it’s a consumption model based on the volume of data written to the platform. The infrastructure evolves to support the demands of the workloads and the associated SLAs.

Pure1®, a cloud-based, AI-driven data management tool, provides the metering capability and telemetry information to power remote SLA management, full-stack analytics, and predictive support across your entire data platform. Using the self-service interface, you can monitor your company’s usage and performance at all times.

Evergreen//One delivers benefits that matter to CFOs, including:

• Pay-as-you-go billing, with no overprovisioning or additional assets on the balance sheet
• The ability to spend from OPEX budgets
• Included installation, monitoring, and maintenance—reducing staff workload and improving responsiveness
• Short contract terms, ideal for temporary projects
• The ability to align storage expenses with actual consumption and flex up, out, and even down without additional CAPEX spend or staggered leases.
• Low up-front costs and Net Present Value benefits enabling you to streamline cash flows and preserve liquidity to fund other strategic initiatives

Five Reasons to Choose The Pure Storage Data Platform

Unlike most vendors who rely on leases to deliver limited OPEX payment terms, Pure Storage Evergreen subscriptions provide storage SLAs and decouple the underlying technology. Pure retains substantive rights to substitute and evolve the underlying assets. As a result, you’re able to treat Evergreen//One as OPEX, making it easier to manage budgets and data growth.

Evergreen//One delivers capacity as data grows and innovation in volume over the term that continuously considers your operational workloads. The underlying infrastructure evolves as workload performance, availability, and capacity demand changes under the same simple agreement and unit rate.

Here are five benefits CFOs should know about:

• Elasticity: Evergreen//One eliminates the need for large CAPEX purchases up-front that are sized based upon anticipated future usage. As your needs increase, Pure will proactively scale up your business’s infrastructure and capacity, eliminating the risk of re-buys if a CAPEX purchase is undersized. Start small and grow your environment to meet demands with predictable unit costs in a pay-as-you-go model. As a result, you can spend with present consumption, not future expectations.
• Cost management: Evergreen//One bills on-demand usage at a standard rate. If your workloads are consistent, you can reserve that capacity and set a discounted rate with fixed charges for your contract’s duration. If you need more storage, you can choose to increase your commitment and get even better discounts for the remainder of the agreement. Pure maintains ownership of all assets throughout the life of the service, which aligns costs to usage and not assets underpinning the service, creating a real OPEX model.*
• Net Present Value improvements: Balancing future investment with current expenses is a big challenge for many CFOs. With Evergreen//One, you can improve cash flows by avoiding CAPEX purchases and limiting fiscal year expenses to only what is consumed in the current year. As a result, you can then allocate saved capital to green-light transformation projects and address skills gaps—the types of investments that will continue to add value to your organization well into the future.
• Flexible term commitments: Short-term projects can make infrastructure planning even more of a challenge. Purchasing assets that your organization may be slow to utilize after a 12-month project ends often requires a complicated exercise in planning how to align requirements for multiple in-flight projects—and keeping their timelines on track—so they can share infrastructure. With Evergreen//One, you can scale infrastructure up and down to meet changing project requirements, and you’ll only pay for the actual consumption. Projects with different timelines can share the same storage platform, and you won’t have to worry about over-buying, under-sizing, or keeping assets on the books after they’re no longer of use.
• Exit management: Migrations are painful, not only because of the mechanics of moving data but also the costs involved. Underpinned by a flexible architecture, the migration to Pure is the only migration you ever need to perform. You can extend or cancel your contract at the end of the term (even 12-month contracts) without incurring a penalty to purchase or lease infrastructure when exiting the service. Our ActiveCluster™ technology allows the transition of workloads seamlessly from OPEX to CAPEX without interruption of service. You can also leave workloads on Evergreen//One and extend service contracts to continue paying only for what you use.

If you’re looking to leverage financial flexibility for a long-term strategic benefit, Evergreen//One provides improved economics and customer experience. From elasticity to cost management to flexible term commitments, Pure is the solution you need to accelerate modernization.

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*Why an OPEX model is recommended:

1. Pure retains substantive substitution rights to the underlying assets, which requires access, ability to do so without customer’s consent, and having a practical ability to do that for economic benefits. Pure can demonstrate this functional ability to leverage Evergreen’s proven non-disruptive upgrade history and prove the financial benefit by using the same assets to deliver service to multiple customers in the case of service providers. Ensuring no single customer controls the underlying assets.

2. Pure can offer the service across on-prem and public cloud, further decoupling the underlying hardware and ensuring that the customer’s OPEX requirements around control and ownership are satisfied.

*OPEX treatment is subject to customer’s auditor review