Five Reasons Why Storage Could Fail for your Business

Allaster Finke, GlassHouse senior consultant, outlines five reasons that storage can fail. If any of these five reach critical mass, and are either ignored or not thought through properly, then they could become the biggest hurdle in the recovery or progression of your business.

A sea change is taking place in the world of IT. Many companies have been looking at smarter ways to approach storage strategies. This stems either from necessity (they are approaching critical mass on capacity, serviceable life, or functionality) or the understanding that by managing the operating environment that houses their data more intelligently, they can realise real cost benefits in both the short and long term.

Service Delivery
There is no denying that increased functionality brings added complexity. The demands on in house skills to help operate some of these technologies can often push the budget requirement beyond acceptable levels. Even with the skills in house, in some cases, the core infrastructure to support a given technology may not be in place, and not viable for upgrade.

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A while ago, I worked for a mid-sized company who identified a business need to stream broadcast quality video to target customers. Whilst the business strategy called for this service, the IT infrastructure would have required a massive overhaul to be able to support it.

To progress the delivery of this new revenue stream, a hosted service for the provision of this system was engaged and the time-to-market for the new service was much faster than if they had tried it themselves.

By tactically choosing the areas they knew they could support and farming out those too costly for them to invest in, they developed a new and very profitable facet of their business very quickly – and made sure that the gap for that product was not filled by one of their competitors.