Insuring Your Organisation Against the Impacts of Seismic Change

Many organisations have found that they are unable to adapt their business models and accelerate digital transformation. To lay the right foundations, modernising your infrastructure is key. Here’s why.

COVID-19 won’t be the only existential crisis your organisation faces in its lifetime, but it is having a profound impact. The boards of almost every business and public sector organisation are looking to technology for the answers – for quick routes to survival and for the capabilities that will enable them to thrive in future.

The question the C-suite must ask is: is our data infrastructure – the lifeblood of our digital transformation – robust with a modern architecture that allows us to better store, manage, safeguard and utilise data so that we can adapt with rapid agility? Can it help us navigate in days, not months, from crisis mode into a new norm?

Many organisations have found that they are unable to adapt their business models and accelerate digital transformation because the fundamental data infrastructures are built with inflexible, costly technologies that prevent them tapping into the power of data. As such, this inability to deliver data-driven rapid agility has led to many businesses struggling: retailers unable to adapt their operations to online models; manufacturers unable to grow their supply chains. The list goes on.

So what can you do? For many years, we, at Pure Storage have been developing technologies and approaches to managing data that will help to insure against the impacts of seismic change. Before taking your next steps, I have some advice based on our experiences working closely with customers:

In any crisis it’s easy to get caught up in simply reacting to the next problem, but successfully maneuvering to a place of safety is more than immediate survival, it’s about having the flexibility to keep responding to change at speed. Therefore, it’s crucial to really consider the long-term impacts of urgent decisions so that you don’t store up problems for the future. For example, you don’t want to scale up data capacity in order to deal with surging customer demand for your online services in a way that will burden you with rising costs in future. With our model, Pure as-a-Service, you will only pay for what you use, whether your data is on premises or in the cloud – spin up data capacity at the flick of a switch and scale down again when you don’t need it. It’s the perfect way to avoid costly knee-jerk decisions that only solve your short-term problems.

When you can elevate human efficiency through increased automation, you’re in a winning position. Human efficiency is undermined by complexity and unreliability. Eliminate the things that take up time and focus. We understand that managing legacy data infrastructures takes up too much valuable time that could otherwise be spent on rapid innovation. At Pure, everything is about simplicity – something I’m proud to say we’ve demonstrated while supporting our customers at this time. Our highly automated systems enable us and our partners to remotely install our solutions for customers within hours rather than days and weeks. Then from an ongoing management perspective, the entire storage environment can be administered from a mobile phone.

Since many business models have crumbled during the current environment, it’s important that we take stock and fully appreciate that the status quo is well and truly over. In that process, review what can be done differently because that will help deliver the behavioural, cultural and technological change required to create your new norm? Release your organisation from valueless processes, inflexible work patterns and legacy technologies. From a data perspective, I know that cloud is often touted as the panacea for all ills, but it’s important to put cloud in its rightful place: it’s an operating model, not the ultimate destination. By making on-prem just like cloud we have given you a choice: leverage private or public clouds, depending on the workload, economics and business objectives. You are not constrained by the limits of your infrastructure.

While you are going through this urgent process of reflection, I would also urge you to consider new ways to consume technology – a flexible consumption model will give you a crucial lifeline to rapid agility. Unshackle yourselves from the traditional cycles of refreshes and paying again for technology you already have. Instead, seek out approaches, like our own Evergreen model, that give you access to all our innovations without forklift upgrades disrupting your operations. And moving to an OpEx model is certainly the new norm for nimble firms and will fit the CFO’s desire to generate more value from investments without exposing the business to capital risks.

By modernising your infrastructure you can move forward to a ‘data-as-a-service’ mindset with simple, flexible access and consumption wherever your data resides and your business functions. This will help you to lay the right foundations as an organisation to facilitate rapid agility and insure against the impacts of all kinds of seismic change.