3 Reasons CIOs Are Embracing New Storage Technologies

There’s a thorny problem facing IT pros today: CIOs, strapped with budgetary constraints, have adopted a “don’t fix it unless it’s broken” approach to storage.  The problem with that approach is that storage is the heart of IT; continuing to rely on storage solutions with a basic architecture developed two decades ago won’t give forward-thinking businesses the advanced data archival and retrieving capabilities that new business pressures are demanding of them.

IT leaders are finding themselves at a fork in the road.  They’ve got issues with how their company is storing, accessing and mining its data, but their budgets haven’t grown in step with their internal users’ IT expectations. They want to know if maintaining the status quo will be more costly than pursuing new storage innovations. The short answer is, yes.

The adoption of new storage innovations – particularly those that are “software-defined-ready” – will become increasingly more important to CIOs as their job functions shift from managing specific applications and systems to more advanced delivery of technical services.  IT departments are expected to be able to mine more value from the information at their disposal while simultaneously reducing that data’s risk exposure.  As a result, legacy storage built on decades-old frameworks is quickly giving way to new storage technologies optimized for the converged infrastructure – particularly software-defined storage devices that separate the management of the device from the device itself.

Why CIOs are Embracing Storage Innovations

1. Seamless delivery of IT.  CIOs are looking for storage solutions that will help them deliver their IT services in a timelier, cost-effective manner.  This means establishing primary storage options that are able to support all applications and data types across physical, virtual and cloud environments.
2. More value from information.  “Big data” is the big buzzword in storage communities today, and IT pros are taking that to heart.  They want storage solutions for information retention and analytics that will give them the ability to both archive the exploding amounts of data they need to store and to search through massive big data content repositories in a matter of seconds rather than the hours or days it has taken in the past to perform similar functions.
3. Reduction in risk exposure.  IT experts are becoming increasingly more risk averse, so they’re looking for information protection through disk-based storage with deduplication for efficient and high-speed backup and recovery processes.  They want increased speed so they can perform backup and recovery functions at two to three times that of previous storage generations, achievable through software-defined storage mechanisms that separate management and traffic functions.

No matter which vendor’s products a CIO employs in storage solutions going forward, it’s critical that they choose wisely, ensuring that the devices they buy today are enabled for the converged and software-defined environments they will be running tomorrow.