IDC OPINION
Digital transformation (DX) has led to the digital business era, where enterprises’ share of revenue from digital models exceeds that of traditional models. The digital business era puts information technology (IT) infrastructure capabilities at center stage, and IDC’s April 2023 Future Enterprise Resiliency and Spending Survey shows that improving data protection capabilities and modernizing datacenter infrastructure over the next two years to provide the capacity, performance, availability, and scalability needed are the top 2 priorities for enterprises and the areas in which budgets cannot be lowered. Availability requirements are becoming not only more important but also increasingly stringent. Digital transformation makes the IT infrastructure a critical contributor to day-to-day operations, and many of the cloud-native and other new workloads being deployed as part of this evolution make high availability (HA) a more important requirement than ever before.
To deliver this level of high availability, enterprises must start with a resilient storage infrastructure that provides a range of configurable options that allow the right level of availability to be dialed in on an application-by-application basis. A flexible, “defense in depth” strategy like this leads to a lower-cost, more efficient IT infrastructure (enterprises pay for the availability “overhead” only when they need it) and better enables denser workload consolidation — a strategic goal for many CIOs as they modernize their IT infrastructure. This flexibility must accommodate the new reality of hybrid multicloud IT infrastructure since that is the way datacenter infrastructure will be built in the digital era.
IT infrastructure decisions don’t just affect IT infrastructure managers — they also impact application specialists, data protection experts, governance, regulatory compliance, and privacy officers. IT infrastructure managers need to be able to meet line-of-business service-level agreements (SLAs) for performance and availability within the confines of compliance and governance guidelines, while application specialists need the assurance of consistently predictable performance and self-service options that let them easily meet their requirements without having to involve IT. This makes how availability is implemented a key concern during the storage purchase process. To that end, IDC has put together a checklist of availability options, published in this document, that storage decision makers can refer to as they consider how they will modernize their own IT infrastructure and set the stage for a successful digital transformation.