As businesses enter the era of artificial intelligence (AI), enterprise organizations are reaching a tipping point with data storage. Increased regulatory pressure, emphasis on security, and cost concerns have all led to an increase in the on-premises storage of data, and the role of on-premises infrastructure is even more important in data-intensive initiatives such as artificial intelligence.
According to Enterprise Strategy Group research:1
84% of organizations agreed that the growth of AI (including generative AI) has led to them reevaluating their application deployment strategy.
78% of organizations agreed that they prefer to run AI applications on premises.
76% of organizations agreed that they view on-premises application deployments more favorably today than they did five years ago.
As businesses scale business critical and data-intensive workloads, including AI, on premises, demand for cost-effective, scalable storage has reached all-time highs. The inherent flexibility of software-defined storage technology delivers exactly the cost-effective scale that businesses require, but historically, those benefits have been tempered by the complexity of hardware integration, deployment, and maintenance. In the contemporary enterprise, the pressures of staying cyber-resilient and architecting new initiatives—like AI—steal cycles from IT infrastructure operations, storage included. For example, 80% of storage administrators have taken on new responsibilities to support their organizations’ digital transformation initiatives or are under pressure to do so.2
The result is that businesses must radically simplify on-premises infrastructure. The level of scale required for the AI era is not sustainable given traditional systems-based or even software-based approaches to data storage. Increased pressures on internal personnel have already led to recent growth in the adoption of on-premises infrastructure options that can be procured via a consumption-based model or as-a-service, and the pressures of AI will likely accelerate this trend.
The top benefits of as-a-service infrastructure options often manifest in the radical simplification that businesses now demand (see Figure 1). Specifically, the ability to accelerate initiatives via freeing up personnel (cited by 52%) and achieving increased budget flexibility (46%) combined with benefits tied to IT personnel experience/retention (46%) and operational costs (38%) highlight the already significant benefits being experienced.
1. Source: Enterprise Strategy Group Complete Survey Results, Understanding Workload, App, and Data Deployment and Migration Decision-making, July 2024.
2. 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 otherwise noted.