1 Unexpected Benefit of an Enterprise Storage Health Assessment

| 4 minute read

Regular health checks have been used for decades in personal healthcare as a preventive way to catch health concerns early to avoid premature aging, deterioration and in some cases, death.

Such practises have been applied by IT leaders as well to avoid hardware failure. This is the expected benefit of an IT health assessment. But is there more to an Enterprise Storage health assessment beyond avoiding failure? In short Yes.

Why your Enterprise Storage Needs Regular Health Checks

Just like you, the health and performance of your enterprise storage environment may change over time. While aging equipment is an obvious factor that fail, other factors like workload changes, use cases and requirements change can lead to seemingly ‘healthy’ equipment performing sub-optimal.

Raising the stakes is AI/Machine Learning. An optimal performing Information Architecture that includes a healthy enterprise storage environment can be the difference between success and failure with AI. In many sectors, being unsuccessful with AI-based initiatives can put your organisation in ‘follower’ status for years to come.

Whether your data storage is on-premise or in the cloud, it’s critical that you keep your storage infrastructure in good health—after all, data just be your organisation’s most valuable resource. When undertaking an enterprise storage health check, you should be able to get answers to these questions:

• “How healthy is my storage?”
• “Can it scale to handle an influx of data?”
• “Does my enterprise storage environment strengthen my cybersecurity resilience?”
• “Is the cost structure still optimal? Should updates be made to reduce cost and maintain performance ?”
• “Does my enterprise storage environment protect my data from breaches and cyber attacks?”

Sub-Optimal Performance Being Uncovered in 2020

Many Enterprises moved to a cloud-first strategy over the last decade.

This initial transformation period has brought many benefits and advantages to organisations. However, many organisations are discovering that Cloud, like many past IT paradigm shifts, is not a perfect ‘silver bullet’ solution, and 12% are moving a portion of their workloads back to on-premise.

For these early adopters, Cloud 2.0 has begun with a Hybrid Cloud approach that takes a best-of-breed approach to IT infrastructure, computing, storage and data to create the optimal IT strategy and environment.

7 Causes of Sub-Optimal Performance Uncovered by Health Checks

Some of the areas that can result in sub-optimal performance of your enterprise storage environment:

Use cases: Data needs are changing. For example, some organisations are discovering that data storage locally improves the AI performance.

Workload changes: How prepared is your storage infrastructure to handle a flood of data? If you don’t know the answer, you’re putting your organization at risk.

Data Security: Has your enterprise storage environment prioritised data security? This is becoming more important as data breaches increase and ransomware attacks are becoming more expensive

Ageing hardware: Evenually, all assets need to be retired. Infrastructure is no different.

Inefficient computing resources: Not enough cores and memory constraints could be signs of future failure.

Misaligned storage media: Each type of storage media performs differently and have different failure rates. Health checks can ensure you have the right balance.

Networking configuration issues: An optimal performing environment is highly dependent on a healthy, well-functioning network.

Let the Enterprise Storage Specialists Guide You Forward

Over the last 6-months, many of our clients have taken a renewed look at their IA due to the rising IT costs caused by COVID. Many are retaining the strengths of the cloud while reducing the costs of their IT operations.

That’s where we can help guide you forward.

One such tool is the Client Storage Assessment. This Free-to-You engagement helps you understand the operating performance of your enterprise storage environment, now and into the short term future. The output provides you with a roadmap to Optimal Performance, whether you operate in an OPEX or CAPEX environment. Request your free engagement here.