Data Access in the Era of Digital Transformation
Access to data is the lifeblood of your enterprise. How you leverage your data differentiates your business. But in a digital decade, data proliferation requires a fundamental change in how it is accessed, stored and managed.
Whether you’re undertaking large-scale digital transformation or a smaller series of incremental digital initiatives, meeting the needs of a digital enterprise means access to all of your data must be fast and uninterrupted to meet the demands of ever-increasing numbers of users and applications.
In this 5-part blog series, we’ll explore three strategic focus areas to digitally transform the enterprise: customer experience, operational processes and business models. In this introductory post, we’ll focus on how hyperconverged infrastructure, software-defined storage, and Parallel I/O support an improved customer experience.
But first, let’s look at why digital transformation is such a hot topic, how it applies to storage virtualization, and why it matters to you.
Storage Virtualization and Data on Demand
In a new world of distributed and diverse data, the traditional data warehouse verges on obsolescence. When it comes to data storage, a 2017 Gartner report shows that better management of data growth and ensuring high availability of data in support of business demands are the top priorities. This underscores the importance of digital initiatives requiring rapid and reliable data integration, data sharing, and data storage by users and by applications.
In addition, users and customers expect IT services to be always on, and always connected—or you risk losing business. Storage virtualization is changing the game for all things digital—including big data, cloud, mobile apps, SaaS, IoT and even artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Defining Today’s Storage Virtualization
Storage virtualization is a single data integration platform that lets you not just query and access data across your network, but also data that resides in the cloud and on premises across various sources and systems. Storage virtualization technology has expanded beyond data federation to provide what is essentially a virtual data layer across the entire enterprise.
Storage virtualization software lets you access and query all types of data across the network as if it were in a single place. It’s a “universal access” environment you can have without ever physically moving the data. This frictionless access means you can deliver required data to business users and apps quickly, regardless of where it is physically located. It also simplifies application management and supports the unification of endpoint management. With storage virtualization, you get a flexible data management approach that delivers significant savings over traditional data replication and consolidation. All of this lays a foundation for increased productivity, an empowered digital workspace, and rich mobile experiences for users, delivered where and when they need them.
Virtualization also gives you the ability to develop, test, iterate, update and scale rapidly, further supporting your digital initiatives. So, what does this mean to you? More insight from your data, and faster responses for analytics and business intelligence applications.
Common Digital Obstacles
Digital transformation requires companies to move at hyper speed toward the cloud. Hyperconverged storage solutions enable you to modernize, automate and transform your business with faster deployment, enhanced scalability and simplified management, all while building an integrated data storage infrastructure. This approach, combined with Parallel I/O, offers lightning fast access, as well as the ability to leverage all of your resources and manage them centrally to scale storage capacity independently of compute and memory. Then there is the load balancing benefit of virtualization, which creates significant performance improvements through efficiency. This trifecta of technology optimizes access to your data so your business is poised to take the next step in digital transformation.
Seize this Opportunity
Digitization brings tremendous opportunities to your business, no matter what industry you’re in. By allowing your organization to remove physical, geographic and device-specific restrictions of data storage equipment that slow, interrupt or endanger your IT operations, you can dramatically and positively transform the customer experience.
And that is just the beginning, as you’ll see in part 2.
Download a trial today to learn how DataCore can help you drive transformation across infrastructure, operations, and applications strategy.
