Meet Dorothy. She’s a data storage system expert on the digital transformation team at her organization. It’s an exciting opportunity. And yet, as the team starts its journey, she feels like another Dorothy, beset by all sorts of challenges on the road to the wonderful new digital world. She doesn’t need the Scarecrow, Tin Man, or Lion to tell her there will be dangers. She sees them at every team meeting.

She’s also read about them in a recent report by Deloitte Insights. In the survey, IT decision-makers identified multiple obstacles to data modernization:

  • Budget or cost constraints (55%)
  • Lack of understanding of technologies (44%)
  • Lack of consensus among decision-makers (41%)
  • Absence of clarity of success metrics (40%)

One thing Dorothy noticed right away? These aren’t technology obstacles. The main obstacles identified in the survey are the same ones she sees in team meetings: complex data environments, dueling cost spreadsheets, disagreements on schedule, and conflicting executive priorities. Anything but cool new technology. Dorothy realizes that if she doesn’t deal with these challenges up front, they’ll lurk throughout the entire project and cause budget overruns, delays, and organizational problems.

At the next meeting with her technology partner Pure Storage®, Dorothy brings up the challenges she anticipates in the transformation project ahead. She’s surprised by the response she hears. Instead of discussing their products and benefits—the simplicity of all-flash storage, the proactive and predictive support, or the flexibility of storage as a service—the Pure team introduces their workshops.

These collaborative workshops are designed to tackle the challenges she described: Challenges that go beyond technology. Each workshop focuses on a specific technology area and addresses people, process, and planning challenges. During the workshop, teams work together to:

  • Gather objective data
  • Build a total cost of ownership model
  • Agree on metrics
  • Develop a roadmap
  • Get buy-in across the organization
  • Deliver a tangible plan for moving forward

At the end of each workshop, there’s a report, a plan, and a comprehensive knowledge transfer, so Dorothy’s team is ready to take action. Dorothy can see how these workshops could bring together disparate teams into one cohesive, powerful unit. And after just a few days of concentrated work.

There are several workshops from which to choose:

  • Assessment and Optimization: The workshop offers a full infrastructure discovery and analysis service. It’s designed to provide an objective assessment of the current data system to support a clear transformation plan. The assessment includes storage usage, growth forecasting, and total cost of ownership. The plan then takes agreed-upon goals and metrics into account to maximize return on investment, reduce risk, and improve stability and business continuity.
  • Multicloud Strategy: Covers on-prem, cloud, and hybrid architectures to deliver a customized cloud-strategy plan. It aligns the latest cloud technology with the business goals to create an actionable plan with a return on investment model, a reference architecture, and an assessment of the cost savings to be gained from migrating to the public cloud. It also provides a phased cloud-adoption plan for a streamlined migration to the new multicloud architecture.
  • Design and Production Readiness for Portworx®: Helps the DevOps team and Storage team work together to get container-based apps up and running quickly. They’ll work on an actual Kubernetes cluster to deliver a persistent storage solution for the platform. The end result is a storage solution for container-based applications that can be scaled up and out to all the organization’s applications.
  • ActiveCluster™, Active Data Recovery, and VMware integration workshops

Dorothy is impressed that the workshops focus on objective data gathering and analysis.  She doesn’t need to hear a multiday pitch on products. She needs help addressing the people, process, and planning challenges. She can see how these workshops could bring the team, their executives, and the organization together to understand the data environment, agree on goals and metrics, and build a plan for success. And she wouldn’t even need a pair of ruby slippers to get it done.

Build Your Pure Knowledge at Pure//PEAK Week 2021. Join us June 22 and 24 to develop your individual capabilities and knowledge to support success with Pure products.