Why Every Modern Enterprise Needs a Storage Champion

Unlocking the full value of enterprise storage takes intentional efforts, an open mind, and a commitment to innovation, collaboration and cost management. In the modern enterprise, the storage infrastructure has become a strategic asset that drives business outcomes, creates opportunities for cost savings, and holds the keys to whether a ransomware or malware attack takes down the whole company or not.

However, without a storage champion to carry the torch of the latest advancements in enterprise storage capabilities, the enterprise is like a boat without a rudder. It’s best to cultivate a culture of cyber resilient storage with a knowledgeable person – whether a storage admin, an engineer, IT manager or storage-savvy CIO – advocating for the cause of enterprise storage across the organization.

Every enterprise that has modernized or will modernize their storage infrastructure needs a storage champion for the following five reasons:

1. Proactively staying on top of storage innovation, such as automated cyber protection, cyber detection on primary storage, 2.5x performance improvement, the lowest latency, hybrid multi-cloud storage integration, and doubling storage capacity without enlarging the storage array
2. Harnessing the business value of enterprise storage, not just the technical value, so you can have the storage array pay for itself within one year and align storage with business priorities
3. Reducing silos and building productive connections with other functions within the enterprise, such as integrating enterprise storage with a Security Operations Center (SOC) and security monitoring applications to trigger immutable snapshots of data at the first inkling of a cyberattac
4. Taking advantage of highly valuable, *free* resources, services and support, such as “white glove” support and the Technical Advisor that every Infinidat customer gets at no extra cost
5. Obtaining 100% funding for storage every year by elevating the positive perceptions of storage internally and making storage a source of cost efficiencies for funding new IT projects, such as AI.

The storage champion in any enterprise has the opportunity to advance the data infrastructure and be seen as a forward-thinking IT leader driving positive change. With so many changes happening with cybersecurity, cloud, applications and workloads, an enterprise’s storage capabilities need to keep up, be safeguarded, and be cost-effective. If one of these core pieces is out of balance, the consequences could include wasted time and money, business disruption, or a successful cyberattack that takes down the company. The storage champion is not only an advocate, but also like a watchman on the wall, vigilant and prepared to take action when needed.

Proactively staying on top of storage innovation
Infinidat has transformed its broad portfolio of enterprise storage solutions over the past couple of years, ranging from delivering the industry’s lowest latency and highest performance in a storage array to hybrid multi-cloud capabilities and state-of-the-art cyber resilience to combat cyberattacks. The introduction of our fourth-generation InfiniBox® G4 family in May 2024 is the first place for storage champions to look for the latest innovations in enterprise storage.

The new InfiniBox G4 storage arrays deliver up to 2.5x performance increase over the current generation of InfiniBox and InfiniBox™ SSA II solutions. We delivered a completely new storage array family built from the ground up that substantially extends Infinidat’s cyber storage resilience and real-world application performance.

Adding to the cyber resilience capabilities, a first-of-its-kind capability that is making storage personnel look like “stars” is our InfiniSafe® Automated Cyber Protection (ACP), which is designed to reduce the threat window for cyberattacks by seamlessly integrating with an enterprise’s Security Operations Center (SOC) and/or their data center-wide Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) or Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) cyber security software applications.

In addition, we unveiled a strategic extension of its Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS) offerings with the advancement of our InfiniVerse® platform, improving the ability to procure and utilize storage infrastructure. The InfiniVerse platform is designed to provide an easy, cloud-like experience for enterprises and service providers across Infinidat’s storage estate, whether on-premises or in the cloud.

The menu of Infinidat’s innovations is worth a second look.

Harnessing the business value of enterprise storage
Storage champions should know about an IDC study of enterprises found that the payback for an enterprise’s purchase of an Infinidat InfiniBox solution is within 11 months, showing a rapid return on investment (ROI) on enterprise, cyber resilient storage for data infrastructure.

The research also revealed that Infinidat customers realize significant additional value, with an average annual benefit of $1.29 million and a 162% ROI over five years. On average, enterprises cut their storage operations costs by nearly half by transitioning to Infinidat’s enterprise storage solution.

The market research explored the business value and business benefits for enterprises using InfiniBox hybrid systems for improving the efficiency of storage management, better supporting business operations, ensuring storage-related uptime, and achieving significant cost savings.

Reducing silos and building productive connections with other functions within the enterprise
By collaborating with other people in an enterprise, the storage function can be more integrated with other IT functions and align with business priorities. When the storage champion works with the cybersecurity team or infosec leader, it’s easier and more efficient to deploy new innovation, such as the InfiniSafe Automated Cyber Protection.

Never before has an enterprise been able to seamlessly integrate enterprise storage and cyber threat monitoring. But with our InfiniSafe ACP, enterprises can easily integrate the cyber storage functions with their SOC, SIEM and/or SOAR cyber security software applications, and simple syslog functions for less complex environments.

A security-related incident or event triggers immediate automated immutable snapshots of data, providing the ability to protect InfiniBox and InfiniBox SSA block-based volumes and/or file systems and ensure cyber recovery.

Collaborations with business-line managers, application developers, the networking infrastructure team, and, for companies that offer digital products, salespeople turn storage from what used to be considered an “invisible” backroom function that strategic IT leaders did not want to think about into a productive partner to support and power the business forward.

Taking advantage of highly valuable, *free* resources, services and support
Infinidat delivers comprehensive white glove service – at no additional cost. We start by directing every customer straight to L3 development support, if they have an issue, which is the highest level of customer support in the industry. There are no stops along the way, much to the delight of customers. With every purchase of any Infinidat enterprise storage solution a Technical Advisor (TA) is assigned to serve as the experienced technical account consultant with full oversight to ensure customer success including optimizing their storage estate to benefit their applications, workloads, and use cases.

As part of Infinidat’s industry-leading “white glove service,” the TA is managing everything for the customer: whether it’s an escalation, or a warranty that is about to expire, or an application that needs more capacity, or any variety of actions that need to be taken. If you’re a customer, Infinidat is there for you. No other major storage vendor does what Infinidat does with such an extensive “white glove service.”

Without an internal storage champion digging deeper into options for enterprise storage, you may not even be aware that all of this is available when you are an Infinidat customer.

Obtaining 100% funding for storage every year brings
When you optimize your storage infrastructure, you free-up resources – specifically, money for capital expenditures – to do those leading-edge projects that you want and need to do. Consolidating your enterprise storage with storage solutions built for consolidation and reduction of CAPEX and OPEX, such as Infinidat’s enterprise storage solutions, can save you a substantial of money that can be used to fund the really cool innovation projects that will drive your organization’s business forward.

You can do so much to automate enterprise storage, as well as consolidate storage. You can reduce overhead and make it much easier to manage storage, allowing the system to manage itself. You can shift to a “set-it-and-forget-it mentality” after you extract the value from the storage infrastructure.

When a storage champion explains this approach to enterprise storage to the CEO, CFO, CIO, CISO and COO, it changes the conversation and makes funding storage for the next year (and beyond) an easier conversation because enterprise storage becomes a dynamic aspect of the infrastructure that can be managed to unlock the full business and technical value of the IT investment.

We can help you on how to successfully “champion” enterprise storage from the data center to the C-suite and the boardroom.

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