As data volumes escalate, many organizations are looking for storage efficiencies — and they have found it with software-defined storage (SDS).

“For IT organizations undergoing digital transformation, SDS provides a good match for the capabilities needed — flexible IT agility; easier, more intuitive administration driven by the characteristics of autonomous storage management; and lower capital costs due to the use of commodity and off-the-shelf hardware,” said Eric Burgener, research director at IDC.

The analyst firm predicts the SDS market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 13.5% through 2021.

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Without upgrades and enhancements, nearly every company at some point reaches the natural limits of its IT infrastructure. That threshold seems to hit sooner rather than later when it comes to storage, thanks to escalating volumes of data and increasing workloads.

To avoid capacity problems and ensure continued business growth, it’s critical to modernize storage infrastructure. Here’s how two different organizations reached that conclusion and the paths they took toward upgrading.

A Lesson in Scale

Mesa Community College (MCC) in Arizona enrolls more than 40,000 students each year. Like many organizations, its IT environment included multiple systems from multiple vendors, and the college has a lean IT staff to manage it all.

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IT and business executives nearly always say data security is the No. 1 issue keeping them awake at night. The ramifications of a breach or attack loom large — whether it’s the potential of financial losses, brand damage, or loss of intellectual property.

The concerns escalate when it comes to data stored in the cloud. As companies increasingly deploy either their own private clouds or a mix of private and public, they’re recognizing the need to pay greater attention to data protection. And with forecasts rising for the volume of data in cloud storage, it’s becoming a critical issue.

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Although much of the initial excitement for blockchain technology centered around bitcoin and financial services, it’s quickly showing applicability to other areas for increased business value.

For example, Walmart has invested in blockchain to improve its supply chain operations. In initial tests, the retailer says the technology reduced the time it takes to track food as it moves from farms to stores — from six days to two seconds.

That’s all due to the decentralized nature of blockchain. It’s often referred to as a distributed consensus model, consisting of nodes or blocks of encrypted information. Each node contains the exact same data and transaction history, and that information is secured with cryptographed hashes and digital signatures.

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Digital transformation requires companies to be nimbler, more proactive, and more responsive to customers. Our always-on culture has begotten the need for always-available data.

Meanwhile, the tolerance for downtime continues to plummet. Whether it’s a bank customer conducting a financial transaction or a salesperson submitting an order, a processing delay is no longer acceptable. An interruption like this sets off an IT scramble to determine how to fix that “app-data gap” — i.e., what’s causing delays in data delivery to applications.

To alleviate the app-data gap and improve data-center operations, many organizations have turned to flash storage, which speeds delivery and improves performance. And while it does provide much-improved efficiency and speed than traditional hard drive disk storage, flash alone doesn’t solve other problems like configuration and interoperability issues that cause the app-data gap.

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The emergence of data-heavy applications such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and the Internet of Things (IoT) has upped the enterprise storage ante. Combined with the data in apps used daily to run the business, the limits of storage are being stretched.

Yet having to continually procure storage capacity doesn’t make sense; forward-looking CIOs and IT decision makers must future-proof their investments. Here’s what to consider.

• Performance

Digital business will constantly evolve, meaning organizations will need to deploy applications and services as business needs change or new objectives emerge.

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