A big shift has occurred in the enterprise storage industry over the last 12 months and changed the drivers for enterprise storage. Previously, CIO and CTO buyer conversations focused on cost efficiency and performance. Today, the two biggest priorities are cybersecurity and product delivery time.

Customers are waking up to two new realities - enterprise storage needs to be a critical component of an enterprise's corporate cybersecurity strategy, and product delivery lead times vary significantly between vendors. One may deliver products ordered in weeks, while another vendor will take many months just to deliver complementary products for an end-to-end solution.

ENTERPRISE STORAGE IS A KEY ELEMENT IN CYBERSECURITY
In the past, customers buying enterprise storage solutions were quick to talk about capacity, speed, IOPS, workloads, and application profiles. Storage cybersecurity wouldn't even make the agenda until the 8th conversation or later. In 2022, however, initial conversations are laser focused on cybersecurity and how enterprise storage must be a core element in an overall corporate cybersecurity strategy.

The realisation that primary and secondary storage is integral to strong enterprise cybersecurity - including immutable snapshots, fast recovery, fenced-in forensic environments and more - casts a wide net around the one thing that keeps C-level executives and IT leaders up at night - cyber resilience.

Integrating storage and security for cyber resilience Without the right level of cyber resilience built into its enterprise storage and data infrastructure, any organisation faces a huge gap. That's why it takes nearly 300 days for an organisation to figure out if they have been infiltrated by a cybercriminal. Working with large enterprises to increase their cyber resilience, we have learned what it takes to integrate storage and cybersecurity together for an end-to-end approach.

DATA CENTRE SIMPLIFICATION ADVANCES GREEN IT
Of course, the consolidation of enterprise storage in the data centre and its dramatic impact on capital and operational expense structures still influence these conversations too. As enterprises upgrade to improve their cybersecurity, they are consolidating from a high number of storage arrays to Infinidat's petabyte-scale enterprise storage platforms.

Instead of having 50 storage arrays in the data centre, IT executives can consolidate their enterprise storage environment, while getting greater capacity, better availability, unmatched real-world application performance, and greater storage cybersecurity. Data centre simplification by consolidation of enterprise storage is also a major factor in advancing green IT efforts - using substantially less power, cooling, floor space, and resources.

ACCELERATE DECISIONS, INCREASE CERTAINTY
Strategic planning like this needs to be done earlier, with decisions made quicker. Working closely with suppliers should involve being creative about how to speed up delivery timelines. This prevents bigger problems down the road, because customers ordering products now face a 4 month shipment lead time. It's important to think ahead and accelerate decisions as strategic plans are mapped out.

The smooth functioning of a business depends on these technical and business decisions. It will avoid having to face an irate CEO who wants to know why the data infrastructure could not scale, or why IT products needed to support the next phase of digital transformation, thwart malware and ransomware threats or elevate DevOps, can't be delivered. Start these conversations early to avoid getting caught digitally flat-footed.

More info: www.infinidat.com