Earlier this year, Nebulon conducted a survey exposing the biggest challenges enterprises face in transforming their on-premises application storage environments, which have only been exacerbated during the Covid-19 era.
The independent survey was completed back in June by IT decision makers at 500 companies in the IT, financial services, manufacturing, retail, distribution and transport industries across the UK, US, Germany and France.
While IT organisations cite multiple restrictions, the survey reveals limited infrastructure automation and high Capex as the most significant challenges for those deploying enterprise storage array technology, forcing them to re-examine IT spending and operations even more so than usual amidst the pandemic.
While increasing automation and reducing costs may seem like mainstream initiatives for any large organisation, the pandemic and resulting workforce restrictions mandate significant progress in days or weeks, versus months or quarters.
The results of the survey, undertaken by Vanson Bourne, further reinforce this as respondents also highlighted their on-premises application storage environments are difficult to maintain, and reveal that they lacked the in-house expertise necessary to manage them.
Even more disconcerting, respondents indicate that their traditional external storage arrays are not suited to handle new workloads, including containers and NoSQL databases. This is unsurprising as modern workloads have been architected for local versus shared storage resources.
British IT decision makers specifically ranked ‘expensive’ highest, with 57% making this one of their top three challenges, followed by ‘time consuming to maintain’ (50%) and ‘difficult to automate at scale’ (49%).
Respondents from smaller organisations (1,000-2,999 employees) were more likely to mark ‘lack of in-house expertise’ highly compared to larger organisations (3,000+ employees) (59% compared to 31%) while these larger companies were more likely to consider cost a top challenge (61% compared to 35%).
“The impact of the pandemic is forcing CIOs worldwide to reconsider their operations,” said Siamak Nazari, co-founder and CEO of Nebulon, Inc.
“Reducing costs through server-based storage alternatives without the restrictions of hyperconverged infrastructure, and reducing operating cost pressure through cloud-based management of the application storage infrastructure are crucial initiatives for IT organisations looking to survive this new normal.”
For companies with a growing class of mission-critical data that cannot or should not move to the public cloud, Cloud-Defined Storage is an alternative to expensive storage arrays, offering enterprises a cloud-managed, server-based approach for mission-critical storage.
