Top 10 Important IT Strategy Considerations for 2015

The following are excerpts from the full report, Top 10 Important  Information Technology Strategy Considerations for 2015, Excerpts, by:
 Randy Kerns, senior strategist and analyst, Evaluator Group, Inc., and
  John Webster, senior partner and analyst,  Evaluator Group

At the end of the year, we looked ahead for our IT clients to predict the trends that would impact their 2015 information technology and storage management. Of all the trends, we chose ten that were the most important for them to consider what it means for an IT strategy.

Here is a summary of each consideration:

1. Acceleration of processing capability as delivered by IT will continue to be a major focus. However, the word ‘acceleration’ in this context can have at least two strategy implications: gaining greater system performance as measured by IT in its continuing effort to maximize IT’s processing capabilities in general and faster time to market for new and updated user-facing applications.

2. Flash technology in the form of SSDs or custom flash modules is now the long-term strategy for primary storage. As a result, we now believe that this will be a major focus in 2015. It is clear that solid state systems have matured with the addition of enterprise capabilities including seamless failover, remote replication, and stretched clusters and we expect price erosion will be driven by mainstream use of 3D or ‘stacked’ NAND flash technology, increased use of data reduction, and new connectivity and protocol usage of PCIe with NVMe.

3. The incursion of Original Device Manufactured (ODM) products into the storage market is now being recognized as a growth market. Enterprise users in general, do not have the wherewithal to take advantage of an ODM relationship. However, we are already seeing vendors make product introductions that attempt to translate webscale cost and deployment models to enterprise storage and acquisition alternatives.

4. During 2014 we saw that some big data analytics projects were being driven into the data center, either to implement or to take over operations from business departments that started them. However, 2014 consistently showed slow progress in the advancement and management of big data analytics projects by IT.

5. Enterprise IT is now not only keenly aware of but also trying to control shadow IT-and the continued challenge to bring these user groups back under the umbrella of IT.

6. Growing interest in and deployment of the converged system-server/network/storage integrated into an appliance-for a number of reasons that include VDI deployment and private cloud instantiation. The arguments for and against.

7. The advancement of open-source in enterprise IT along with the discussion of the cost equation of ‘free’ software.

8. Dealing with mobile devices to serve an increasingly mobile workforce will continue to require the reengineering of IT processes and applications. Implementing file sharing and synchronization across disparate systems (mainframe and open) and data silos specific to certain applications will continue to be the most prevalent challenge.

9. Increase in overall storage capacity demand has led many enterprise storage architects to conclude that their current approach to data protection is unsustainable for many reasons – cost, administration, physical space, power, etc.

10. Software-defined storage (SDS) took on a myriad of definitions in 2014 as vendors tried to establish their own parochial claims about their solutions. We believe that in 2015, potential SDS users need to first do a TCO evaluation on these platforms to make an informed decision on whether or not to replace existing arrays with ones that are software defined.