IDC: Accelerating Your Innovation with Smarter Ways to Buy Your Storage

One of the big things that public cloud has brought to the table for IT infrastructure is having access to a range of infrastructure performance and capabilities, and to pay for as much or as little as you need.

While getting to grips with the dynamism and agility that comes with this freedom has been challenging at times, it’s become broadly adopted and very much valued.

It’s taken some time, but the same dynamic approach to pay as you go has begun to take hold in private IT too, with flexible consumption models. This is where your key IT suppliers install physical kit into your own IT environment that you do not own. Instead, you have access to the resources and you are billed for what you use. This approach can drastically cut the cost of buying things like storage capacity over the lifetime of a typical storage array.

Rather than paying upfront for the entire predicted capacity that you will eventually need over the five or so years the array is in production, the vendor can provide it as a service and you pay for what you actually use. It’s up to them to meet your service needs, and to monitor use to ensure enough capacity is in place to grow as you do. Coupled with simplified and more transparent pricing approaches, this can significantly reduce the cost of buying storage capacity.

But this saving, while really important for any IT organization, is only just a chapter in a bigger value story that spans both IT and the business itself:

• Eliminating the upfront cost of storage enables modernization and transformation to be delivered quickly and upfront, without taking precious cash away from investing in engaging with customers or developing new products.
• You can scale costs as your business scales, not before.
• You can respond instantly to changing market dynamics by eliminating lengthy and complicated procurement processes.
• You can attract investors by reducing cost overhead in excess installed capacity and IT operations costs.
• You can speed up and de-risk innovation by providing capacity to experiment without lengthy and expensive commitments.
• You can improve the customer experience by having better performing and more resilient IT infrastructure supporting your critical business applications.
• Having external experts install and manage the storage for you means your IT team can instead focus on the apps and services that make a difference to your business.

Where are you on your journey to cost-effective and flexible storage? Are you still stuck in the noughties, or are you making a break for freedom? To learn more, read the IDC Market Spotlight

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