Modernization of infrastructure
As data growth accelerates and data strategies are refined, organizations are under pressure to modernize their data infrastructure in a way that is cost-effective, secure, scalable, socially responsible and compliant.
Organizations with legacy infrastructure often own hardware from multiple vendors, especially if IoT and OT data is involved. Their challenge, then, is to create a seamless, unified system that takes advantage of automation to optimize routine processes and apply AI and machine learning to that data for further insight.
“That’s one of my focus areas at Hitachi Vantara,” says Patel. “How do we combine the power of data coming from OT and IoT? How can we provide insight to people in a heterogeneous environment if they don’t have time to switch from one machine to another? That’s what it means to create a seamless data plane.”
Social responsibility involves carefully considering an organization’s carbon footprint and finding data infrastructure solutions that support emissions reduction goals. Hitachi Vantara estimates that emissions attributable to storage infrastructure can be reduced by as much as 96% through a combination of changing energy sources, upgrading infrastructure and hardware, adopting storage management software and automating workflows – while improving storage performance and reducing costs.
Access to the hybrid cloud
While many organizations are pursuing a cloud-first approach, a more nuanced strategy is gaining momentum among forward-thinking CEOs. It’s more of a “cloud that makes sense” or “cloud smart” strategy.
In this scenario, organizations have a strategic approach to where they place applications, data, and workloads, based on security, financial, and operational considerations. There are four basic building blocks of this hybrid approach: seamless management of workloads wherever they are; a data plane that provides appropriate capacity, cost, performance and data protection; simplified, highly resilient infrastructure; and AIOps, which provides an intelligent automated control plane with visibility across IT operations.
“I think the hybrid will be around for a long time for businesses,” says Patel. “The important thing is that you can do whatever you want with the data, regardless of where it is. It can be on-prem, in the cloud or in a multi-cloud environment.”
Clearing up cloud confusion
The public cloud is often seen as a location: a place where organizations can discover speed, agility, scalability and innovation. That place then contrasts with legacy on-premises infrastructure environments that don’t provide the same user-friendly features as cloud-connected services. Some IT leaders assume that the public cloud is the only place they can take advantage of managed services and automation to reduce the burden of managing their own infrastructure.
