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Business-defined storage will help reconnect businesses with IT, says Forrester
Business-defined storage and datacentres will make IT more business-centric, according to Forrester
A quarter of European businesses believe IT hinders business success, but business-defined storage and datacentres will make IT more business-centric, according to Forrester.
Speaking at Fujitsu Forum in Munich, Forrester senior analyst Rachel Dines said 25% of business leaders in Europe believe IT hinders business success, while only 10% of business leaders say IT helps to drive business strategy and innovation.
She posed the question: “How else are we going to drive forward in the business without innovation?”
Dines also said the number one risk for business continuity managers was increased reliance on business IT. According to Forrester, 36% of applications are considered critical, and must have the highest protection possible.
Data growth
At the same time, enterprise data stores are growing, with a 60% increase between 2010 and 2012. “There’s no argument that data is growing at an exponential rate,” she said.
Businesses can no longer afford to have any downtime and must run business operations 24/7 in an always-on world. They cannot have downtime when their competitors have uptime, she said, and the cost of downtime is very high, as is the risk to reputation.
Yet European CIOs plan to increase their hardware budgets by less than 1% in 2014.
Businesses need to move away from software-defined datacentres towards a more business-defined approach which focuses specifically on business requirements rather than on applicationsRachel Dines, Forrester
Dines said businesses need to move away from software-defined datacentres towards a more business-defined approach which focuses specifically on business requirements, rather than on applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and human capital management (HCM).
“We want to think about payroll, supply chain management, business processes, and base it on that,” she said. “Software-defined doesn’t get to that next level.”
Fujitsu storage
This analysis from Forrester came alongside the launch of Fujitsu’s business-centric product line at the Forum today.
Fujitsu's business-defined storage products include Eternus DX S3 disk storage and the Eternus CS8000 unified data protection platform.
The DX S3 provides five times the performance of the DX S2, as well as up to 90% system utilisation.
Meanwhile, to tackle the issue of big data’s exponential growth year on year, the CS8000 backup and archiving platform claims to have 300% capacity increase to 15PB, as well as a 50% speed increase up to 150TB per hour.
