Make your data storage investments go further and avoid a capacity crunch
In the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, enterprises across many industries have been understandably reluctant to make significant investments in their IT infrastructure. But as restrictions lift and hard-hit businesses begin to recover from the upheaval, it’s more vital than ever to have a mature, future-ready storage platform.
Identifying regulatory risks in data storage and compliance
So what makes data storage such an important capability for businesses in the post-pandemic world? One of the key factors is compliance. Many companies pivoted rapidly to the digital channel to continue engaging with customers—and although the pandemic brought unprecedented disruption, compliance with regulatory requirements remains critical for all online services.
If businesses get this wrong, the stakes are high. For example, the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) sets fines of up to €10 million or two percent of a company’s annual revenue, whichever is the higher. To mitigate risk, any organization that captures and stores customer data must be able to demonstrate their compliance with the regulation. This may include the ability to protect data, specifically personally identifiable information, using encryption—and if an ageing enterprise storage platform is unable to deliver on these requirements, your exposure could be significant.
Ensuring business continuity
Another crucial consideration is the development of new business services. While many businesses are restarting in-person operations, it’s likely that hybrid working and digital customer services will remain integral elements in business models for years to come. As demand for data-driven services grows, businesses must ensure that they have both the storage capacity and performance to satisfy the new requirements.
The longer your business delays its investment in storage infrastructure, the greater the risk of a capacity crunch. In this scenario, the risk is that your storage platform is unable to meet your day-to-day operational requirements around reliability, performance, and capacity. In the worst case, this could result in employees being unable to access the digital tools they need to do their work, or leave you cut off from customers and prospects online and on mobile.
Finding the right balance
No company wants to find itself in either of these situations. However, the risks don’t change the reality that many businesses simply do not have the resources to make major investments in storage at the moment.
If your enterprise is facing this dilemma, the good news is that there is a straightforward and cost-effective way to help your existing storage investments go further. Northdoor has the experience, expertise, and solutions to help businesses extend the life of their storage assets without the costly up-front capital investment of a full infrastructure refresh.
Northdoor has the experience, expertise, and solutions to help businesses extend the life of their storage assets without the costly up-front capital investment of a full infrastructure refresh. Click To TweetGain enterprise-class capabilities with IBM FlashSystem
By deploying an IBM FlashSystem storage solution—powered by IBM Spectrum Virtualize software—your business can gain enterprise-class capabilities including encryption, virtualization, and disaster recovery. Acting as a storage hypervisor, integrating IBM FlashSystem with your existing storage area network allows you to orchestrate multiple legacy platforms as a single pool. As a well as reducing your physical storage requirements through data reduction, this approach offers a significant performance boost for critical workloads and easier management for IT administrators.
And with the latest cloud-like offering from IBM for on-premises storage, you can even deploy the capacity you think you’ll need in the future, pay nothing for the new arrays in your data centre, and simply pay-as-you-go monthly for whatever capacity you’re actually using. With no risk and no commitment, it’s a great model for environments such as test/dev where you often want more on-premises capacity but don’t want to invest in permanent resources.
If your company wants to make its data storage investments go further and last longer, talk to Northdoor today. Visit our storage page to learn more, or sign up for a free, no-obligation assessment of your storage landscape.