The age of digital transformation has arrived precisely because organisations understand the value and power of their data. Making better use of corporate information stores is critical to meeting the challenges and demands of customers now and into the future. Storage manufacturer Fujitsu has identified five key steps to maximising value from data:
1. Data exploration
Essentially, understanding what data assets you have and where they are stored. This exploration process is essential, allowing you to make informed decisions about how best to adapt IT and data management to changing demands.
An audit also allows you to assess the best location for your data – and how to optimise for performance, availability and profit.
2. Storage in your hybrid cloud
As the nature of work changes, so does your data storage infrastructure. Hybrid working is now commonplace, so the cloud plays an important role in making data available to your people at any place, any time.
The hybrid cloud model allows you to relocate data and workloads to wherever you can realise the best balance between cost and performance. And with intelligent tiering, you can further optimise operations and budget.
3. Storage on-premise
For the highest performance, nothing beats on-premise infrastructure. Reliability, flexibility and efficiency are all available on tap, ready to power your ongoing digital transformation.
High-performance, all-flash RAID arrays and software-defined storage offer an exceptional experience – essential for mission-critical computing activities.
4. Data protection
Ransomware and cybercrime are a real and present danger, making disaster recovery provisions more important than ever. Designing a comprehensive, reliable regimen for data backup, archiving and recovery will be essential to managing these threats – before they even happen.
Again, the hybrid cloud can play a role, using low-cost hosted archive backup to ensure data can always be recovered, no matter how serious the local disaster is.
5. Profit from your data
Putting your corporate data to work is essential if you are to maximise its potential. Your storage infrastructure must always make data available for use.
Data must be hosted and allocated at the most advantageous location. And it may be that intelligent, AI-powered management solutions are the key to migrating workloads to wherever it is required, automatically.
Putting it all together
Ultimately, successful digital transformation is dependent on performance, reliability and availability, putting your data to work for you. Cost control concerns will have to be addressed through greater efficiency and proper allocation of data and workloads.
Using these five steps as a guideline to maximising value from data gives your business has a good basic template for beginning the process of re-engineering your infrastructure for a data-driven future. To learn more about building data storage infrastructure that will help you reach – and exceed – your digital transformation goals, please give us a call.