Businesses increasingly understand the critical role that on-premises modernization plays in their digital initiatives. According to research by TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group, 91% of organizations agree that data center modernization creates a strategic competitive advantage.1 In addition, 76% agree that they view on-premises application deployments more favorably today than they did five years ago.2
Pressures to control costs, secure data, and reduce risk—in addition to new initiatives such as artificial intelligence—have all helped lead to the prioritization of on-premises data center investment. When defining on-premises infrastructure modernization initiatives, performance, cyber-resilience, consolidation, and simplification should be among the top objectives.
For example, as Figure 1 shows, organizations managing enterprise SAN storage environments continue to struggle with optimizing performance (cited by 34%). They also face challenges tied to time to provision (33%) and time to deploy (28%), along with the overall cost of infrastructure (30%).
The ability to consolidate through modernization can be transformational; 85% of organizations agree that their storage modernization efforts have allowed their organization to consolidate their on-premises storage environment, which likely delivers follow-on benefits related to simplification and operational efficiency. Given the importance of mission-critical and mainframe application environments to the business, high performance and consistent low-latency at scale is essential for enterprise storage. In addition, organizations must prioritize cyber-resilience—the ability to secure and protect the environment.
1. Source: Enterprise Strategy Group Complete Survey Results, Navigating the Cloud and AI Revolution: The State of Enterprise Storage and HCI, February 2024. All data in this brief is from this study unless stated otherwise.
2. Source: Complete Survey Results, Enterprise Strategy Group Research Report: Understanding Workload, App, and Data Deployment and Migration Decision-making, July 2024.