EXPERT SPEAK
Banking on flash storage
Flash-based storage technology in the datacentre can make
all the difference between survival or bust argues Christian
Putz from Pure Storage.
I
t is difficult to think of a force that is
having a more revolutionary impact
on the service industry, particularly
banking, healthcare, insurance and
retail, than digitalisation. It is 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. Customer demands are
making traditional players vulnerable to
data-rich, analytic-centric new entrants.
A PwC study reveals some 50% of
consumers surveyed would be prepared
to provide their insurer with additional
personal and lifestyle information in order
to get more relevant services and better
deals. 67% said they would be willing to
have a sensor attached to their car or home
if it could reduce their premiums.
Whatever innovation is happening at
the customer front line, it all boils down to
one question for IT leaders in the service
sector: How can we help our organisations
win in the digital economy; and do so with
less IT complexity, less cost and absolutely
minimal risk? In other words, how can IT
leaders invert IT spend and have it all?
Experience tells us that the answer is
data storage; how you architect and scale
your storage, how you flex that storage to
work at lightning speeds in both physical
and virtual environments, and how you
cost storage to deliver more business
value, for less of your precious budget.
This is because data is the currency of
the digital economy. If it is not serving
the applications and systems that are
driving your digital business, you will lose
out in the race to customer intimacy and
therefore profitability.
In no other business era has time been
so critical an influence on success. Speed
is of the essence. The speed at which your
Christian Putz is Director EEMEA at
Pure Storage.
front end works is utterly reliant on your
storage performance. But you cannot
keep adding storage capacity to individual
databases, or application workloads; that
is just adding cost. And even if that is not
a problem now, what about the time it will
take to manage a sprawling storage estate?
The answer is all-flash storage.
Depending on the vendor you choose to
partner with, all-flash solutions are 10x
faster. They are also 10x more efficient
in terms of power, space and cooling.
With the right all-flash storage solution
in place, you can improve customer
experience, increase operational efficiency
and transform existing business processes
without breaking the bank.
By centralising storage around one
type of flash technology, not only will
you simplify datacentre IT and add
incredible flexibility to deal with both
physical and virtual environments, you
will also make some incredibly important
savings. By partnering with vendors that
offer perpetual upgrade programmes
that are designed to guarantee your
effective capacity with flash media that
can consolidate and modernise as your
organisation grows, you can avoid vendor
dictated upgrade cycles, downtime and
cumbersome data migrations.
Like most organisations in the region,
there is a good chance that you are working
through your own personal journey to
the cloud, which is why it is imperative to
partner with a vendor that offers you a two-
product route to building your own all-flash
cloud platform. Freeing you to develop
such a scalable, simple, high performance
storage environment can help you underpin
your front-office innovations in customer
experience, productivity tools and business
processes, with a storage system capable of
driving transformation.
Quite simply, the time has now come
to consider storage to be one of your
most strategically powerful assets. With
all-flash you have the means to create a
high performance, highly resilient, highly
affordable foundation on which to succeed
in the digital economy. With the right
all-flash solution, you can drive more
business value – achieving considerable
ROI in just a few short weeks – while
inverting IT spend.
In no other
business era
has time been
so critical an
influence on
success.
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