As businesses begin to reprioritize projects put on hold due to the current environment, a top initiative for senior IT leaders is expanding multicloud capabilities as a part of broader digital-transformation strategies.
It’s not surprising that enterprises have accelerated demand for cloud capacity far beyond that prior to 2020. Online traffic spikes maxed out bandwidth, physical data centers were difficult to access, and supply-chain disruptions limited access to hardware. Organizations that had made strides with multicloud strategies were able to avoid crippling disruptions. Those that hadn’t scrambled to retrofit systems and processes to the “new norm.”
The current situation has proven that procrastinating about digital transformation was not just shortsighted—it was a mistake. This has put multicloud capabilities front and center as the current landscape evolves. However, for multicloud to succeed, you’ll need the modern infrastructures to support it.
Band-Aid vs. Bandwagon
Digital transformation requires real, operational change to succeed. According to SAP’s Digital Transformation Executive Study, leaders across industries agree that digital transformation—often synonymous with moving business to the cloud—is critical. They also admit they’re not doing enough about it. It’s hard to condemn hesitation when transformation can sound daunting, both in name and in scope.
However, one-off, band-aid approaches not only defy the point, but also won’t yield real, lasting gains. And lasting gains have been hard to come by. We’re learning that transformation requires a collective mindset and culture to succeed—and everyone has to get on board.
Even still, while people are essential to transformational success, trying to execute that degree of modernization on a legacy IT infrastructure can be limiting, painful, and expensive. This is where a smart multicloud-capable infrastructure powered by Pure Storage® is proving to be critical—especially after seeing how a crisis can cripple operational models forced by legacy systems.
If it’s something organizations have resisted in the past, it’s time to revisit why.
The Risk of Data—and Digital—Inertia
For many businesses in the process of transformation, the real opportunities lie in data. A survey of executives published in Harvard Business Review found that 92% of executives reported accelerating investments in big data and AI projects—but not without facing some challenges.
Consider how you’d analyze unstructured data. This is how months of sales data become critical forecasting predictions, and where real-time tracking metrics provide a glimpse into your customers’ psyches. This unwieldy, complex mass of information is a transformation goldmine that requires immense, smart storage to handle its often unpredictable growth patterns. It also requires plenty of processing power to leverage neural networks, natural language processing, and machine-learning algorithms.
Without the right storage strategy, data silos can mushroom, making the divide between on-premises and cloud platforms difficult to reconcile. Organizations are wary of this, with 92% recognizing they need modernized information management strategies to address rising levels of data chaos. For big data and AI projects, this can lead to poor time to insights at best, and inaccurate insights at worst.
Broadly speaking, a lack of agility here can result in inertia—or even stagnation—of digital-transformation efforts. What’s often missing? A simple, seamless way to unify and future-proof a hybrid, multicloud environment. It exists, and it can be easier to implement than you might think.
Find the Freedom to Lean into “Digital Discoveries”
Transformation is all about being nimble and going with the flow. (Quite the opposite of purpose-built, legacy IT approaches.) Being nimble means having a customizable, flexible IT model that can adapt and scale as you make new “digital discoveries.” The process isn’t one-and-done; the solutions you adopt shouldn’t be either.
Watch the “Financial and Cloud Flexibility and Why it Matters Now” webinar to learn more about why multicloud capabilities are critical to transformation success.
Using modern, flexible storage to bridge the gap between public and private clouds is a simple, strategic (and often overlooked) step that can open the door to digital-transformation success. Sidestep the lock-in pitfall and reduce the complexity of multicloud management by implementing data storage designed for multicloud environments.
This way, you can create your own multicloud transformation use cases—for example, gathering event logs through a serverless compute platform then seamlessly analyzing that data in Google Cloud’s analytics.
Get the Foundation Right to Support Your Transformation Efforts
Whether you’re expanding to more than one cloud provider or are among the 93% of organizations already utilizing a multicloud strategy, putting the right foundation in place first is critical.
One IT service provider foresaw demands increasing due to the current environment. This pushed clients’ business continuity plans—and its own storage solutions—front and center. In order to provide the best possible service to its clients, which include some of the largest banks in the world, the provider needed to bolster its storage, fast. It needed the long-term resilience and stability to support increased cloud-enabled services, virtual desktops, and the ultra low-latency required for remote trading.
Before helping clients modernize their infrastructures, the service provider pulled off its own modernization, bolstering data storage with Pure Storage. The investment paid off. The service provider was able to stay ahead of the curve throughout the pandemic, offer clients the best technology solutions on the market, and provide exceptional service when clients needed it most.
Best Practices for Digital Transformation
- Talk to leaders in each department. Identify blockers, opportunities, and wish-list items. Find out what they need to accomplish their goals, then align data and tech solutions accordingly. These conversations will help you identify the features and bandwidth you may need to start.
- Shop for the best cloud architecture for each workload. This could include a mix of public, private, and managed clouds, plus on-premises data storage.
- Get your data storage solution right. You’ll want modern data components that allow easy, flexible migration of data between providers. You can’t always forecast and plan when experimenting with transformation, so a service like Pure as-a-Service™ can offer the flexible consumption model you need to test, without big capital investments, risk of underprovisioning, or a lack of data mobility between providers.
Modern Hybrid Cloud Solutions
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Your First IT Transformation Likely Won’t Be Your Last
As you reinvigorate digital-transformation projects that you had put on hold, consider whether your current data storage solution supports your objectives. Traditional IT infrastructures can be too brittle to accommodate modern data- and AI-driven projects. Without more modern data and cloud solutions, you risk undermining the ability to achieve your goals.
Going the multicloud route doesn’t have to be a big, complicated, one-time exercise. With a single unified subscription like Pure as-a-Service, you have the flexibility to start small, figure out what works, and change as you go. It’s the perfect complement to an evolving transformation strategy.
Rethinking data storage may not be the first thing many businesses do when planning digital-transformation projects and contemplating a multicloud strategy. But getting the storage strategy right can help transformation projects succeed beyond your expectations. Fast, flexible data storage, as provided by Pure, can unify private- and public-cloud ecosystems. It’s time to eliminate siloed cloud environments, run applications anywhere, and unlock the value of growing stores of unstructured digital data.
Learn more about how Pure can help you conquer the cloud divide.
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