Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 09 | Page 70

TECH TALK Leverage flash storage to accelerate digitalisation while inverting IT spend The time has now come to consider storage to be one of your most strategically powerful assets. Christian Putz, Director EEMEA at Pure Storage, explains how opting for all-flash storage can help you achieve the necessary performance to succeed in the digital economy. 70 INTELLIGENTCIO I t’s difficult to think of a force that’s having a more revolutionary impact on the service industry, particularly banking, healthcare, insurance and retail, than digitalisation. It’s materially changing everything in this sector: the way processes work; the way services are offered; the customer experience; and the speed at which business is executed and where it happens. Digitalisation is driving the innovation edge to exciting new horizons. For example, ‘robo-advisors’ can now aggregate data on markets and customer preferences to generate automated investment advice on behalf of wealth management firms. Even in the ultra-conservative non-life insurance segment, digitalisation is impacting competition. Here, customer demands are making traditional players vulnerable to data-rich, analytic-centric new entrants. For instance, who would have thought that customers would be the ones asking insurers to generate more data about their lifestyle habits? Yet a PwC study reveals some 50% of consumers surveyed would be prepared to provide their www.intelligentcio.com