Enterprise Storage Viewpoint: Economic Certainty in Uncertain Economic World

By Dave Nicholson, field CTO for Americas, Infinidat

Business and IT leaders across the globe continue to seek to transform their organizations digitally.

However, innovation has a price, and as any CTO will tell you, you’re trying to balance the leveraging of new technological innovation in support of the company’s mission with keeping the lights on, which naturally requires cost control. This balancing act is arguably tougher now than it has been in decades.

Widespread economic uncertainty, tightening budgets, and increasing pressure to rethink IT strategies within organizations − due to more stringent requirements for positive ROI and a shorter payback period on new technology deployments − have put Capex and Opex into a more intense spotlight within enterprises.

Economic uncertainty is no exaggeration. In January 2023, the World Bank cut its 2023 global economy growth outlook from 3% to 1.7% and downgraded its prospects for the US economy, which it forecasts could grow by a meager 0.5%, a downgraded estimate that is one of the weakest paces of growth in decades.

“Global growth has slowed to the extent that the global economy is perilously close to falling into recession,” the World Bank said in a statement, citing the “unexpectedly rapid and synchronous” global monetary policy tightening by central banks as a key factor in the slide into economic woes.

Yet, enterprise technology decision-makers and buyers don’t see the worsening economic uncertainty as a sole reason to totally pull back on business value-centric technology investments. The world has changed considerably since the last 2 major economic downturns, and one of the changes is the proliferation of digital transformation as a driver to survive and thrive with competitive advantage – even during economically uncertain times.

In a recent IDC poll of corporate technology managers, 82% said they expect a recession in 2023. However, 62% indicated that their technology spending in 2023 will be similar (or higher) to 2022. Although many companies are re-working their tech spending plans, IT is at the core of many companies’ operations and important for conducting business and supporting revenue growth.

The issue at hand is for enterprises to get a positive ROI within a year on an enterprise-grade technology deployment. This is a reflection of the interactions and important conversations that CIOs, CTOs, CISOs and other IT leaders are having with CFOs and finance departments. The CFO mindset puts the emphasis on business value.

IDC conveyed the crux of it in 2 sentences: “IDC research shows that organizations plan to continue to invest in server, storage, and network hardware despite the challenging economic climate. However, tightening budgets mean that many will face pressure to achieve a quick return on their investments.”

IDC did a series of in-depth interviews of Infinidat customers and applied a systematic methodology for determining the business value of technology. Its analysis found that Infinidat customers realized a payback of 11 months, an annual average benefits per organization of $1.29 million (166.7,000 per petabyte) and a 162% five-year ROI.

Reducing Capex and Opex Increases Economic Certainty
In the midst of economic uncertainty, it is natural to seek out economic certainty as an anchor to weather the storm of upheaval and the financial resetting of an organization. One of the attributes of this economic certainty is having a positive ROI within a year of buying much-needed technology, such as enterprise storage.

IT leaders have the opportunity to proactively share this perspective of “the positive ROI of storage” with their CFOs, the finance departments, and the procurement team. And it’s independently backed by IDC, who did the analysis. IT teams do not need to be caught flat-footed or wavering at a time of economic uncertainty; they can actually contribute to the changing environment with a degree of economic certainty that could save the organization millions of dollars over time.

Of course, companies must have systems that meet the performance, availability, scalability and cyber storage security requirements, but they often face cost and scaling challenges in updating the data infrastructure as data volume increases exponentially. Densely consolidating workloads does increase cost savings, but it all goes back to balancing cost, performance, cyber storage resilience, and availability at scale.

It is logical to pursue a strategy that lowers the cost of enterprise storage while having performance, 100% availability, large enterprise-grade scalability, and cyber storage resilience.

The cost efficiency of Infinidat’s solutions makes it possible for large enterprises to buy large solutions to fit their performance and capacity requirements – and continue to provision the business. For higher performance applications and workloads, the company configures the controllers full of DRAM and stuffing them full of SSDs that are unprotected for caching. It also offers flexible consumption models, while delivering a system in a fully configured design.

The “superpower” that the enterprise market needs most from a storage solutions vendor is the ability to deliver a combination of economics, performance, cyber storage resilience, and availability at scale, like no one else – without compromise. This is at the root of providing a level of economic certainty for an enterprise technology investment, despite the vicissitudes of macroeconomic factors.

Economies will always go up and down, but you’ll always need enterprise storage as part of an overall solution that our channel providers deliver. That’s one certainty you can count on. The challenge of it speaks to the fact that technology investment needs to be better aligned with business value. And now you can get a positive ROI of payback on a new technology investment in 11 months. That’s a formula for happier CFOs, CIOs, CISOs and CTOs. When it comes to enterprise storage, enterprises don’t have to break the bank anymore. Times have changed.

Read the IDC report, The Business Value of Storage sponsored by Infinidat.