IT’s New Frontier

Businesses are embracing digital transformation as they look to the cloud for next-generation data storage. Open industry hardware and software enabling these new virtualized environments have become commoditized, allowing for the displacement of premium-priced proprietary solutions by low-cost, whitebox storage solutions. International Data Corporation

As your customers’ businesses continue to grow and accrue new data, they must also address the need for long-term storage that’s secure and efficient. Many organizations will look to backup certain files, but it’s important to note that backups are ideally used to address short-term (less than 90 day) needs. Backups provide copies of data files in the event of system failures and disasters. Most systems create multiple copies of files, eventually loading the system with duplications of the same files.

As a kid, some of my friends would hide their report cards from their parents when they received a bad grade. Eventually, the parents would realize they hadn’t seen the quarter’s progress report and looked into why. When they found out, they’d be doubly upset. Not only was there a bad grade, but their kid had try to hide the result. So, as my friends contemplated their mistake from the confines of their rooms, they learned, you can run, but you can’t hide. This also holds true in governmental practice as well. In the federal government, the Government Accounting Office (GAO) is that parent and they’re monitoring the progress. The GAO evaluates how well the government is performing on modernizing its IT infrastructure using, you guessed it, a report card.

When creating a data protection, backup and recovery strategy, healthcare organizations have an additional layer of complexity to consider – critical system availability. Critical system availability prioritizes the availability of systems, in order of importance, during emergency situations by articulating which ones need to be re-established first, second and third, to ensure the least downtime for patient safety and uninterrupted quality of care.

Technology is constantly evolving. Cell phones that once looked like radios—too large for real portability—now fit in your pocket. Today, technology is all about speed and an endless array of functionality. For years, early adopters defined the market while the government traditionally lagged behind in adopting new technologies. Well, things are changing. New legislation is driving an atmosphere of ‘tech forward’ throughout the public sector.

Specialized knowledge is becoming one of the most requested services for channel partners to provide to end customers. Sergio Farache, senior vice president of global cloud solutions recently shared his thoughts on why technology channel partners and ISVs should establish specialized solution practices to understand and serve the unique complexities of their customers’ technology deployments.

Did you know the All-Flash Array (AFA) market is one of the fastest-growing sub-segments of the overall enterprise storage space, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.4 percent through 2020?¹  What’s most intriguing is how AFAs help align organizations into the 3rd platform (cloud, mobile, big data and analytics), which IDC predicts will account for 95 percent of IT expenditure by 2020.¹

This week, Tech Data launched our Practice Builder methodology designed to accelerate growth for solution providers in next-generation technology areas, including cloud, security, IoT, analytics and mobility. 

Technology is evolving at breakneck speed. This is pushing those in the channel to review their business strategy in order to stay on top and ahead of the changing technology landscape and the competition. It’s not enough to help your customers simply maintain IT infrastructure anymore—it’s about delivering innovative services, solutions and capabilities that solve customer’s toughest business challenges.

Several things need to happen before your customer can start to pull meaning from raw data. First, a business problem needs to be defined. Next, the customer will have to figure out what data is available to inform an analysis. Finally, the information needs to be consolidated from internal and external systems in order to identify patterns in the data to build context and ­find insights. Only then, can data-driven solutions be proposed.