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.