To encourage greater adoption of storage technologies, the Malaysian government launched MyDigital to expand cloud infrastructure by implementing a “cloud-first” strategy in the public sector. It is commendable that Malaysia's public sector and enterprises are gradually adopting data storage on hybrid cloud, public or hyperscale datacentres, with an emphasis on cybersecurity and data privacy in the digital ecosystem.

Enterprises are becoming more mature and savvy about aligning storage to their needs with the help of cloud. The rise of cloud culture has radically increased expectations concerning the capabilities of storage. Moreover, the enduring impact of cloud is visible as all enterprise storage will move toward cloud-like features in terms of its elasticity, support for automation, enabling of self-service and rapid deployment.

However, there are still some reasons for an enterprise to keep data off the cloud storage platform, for example:

● Data regulation and data sovereignty requirements require medical, financial and other industries to keep large amounts of data on premises, where they can maintain maximum control over their data.

● The disparity of speed between on-premises storage and cloud solutions can be a barrier when networks slow the delivery of data from cloud storage to demanding high performance computing workloads.

● In some cases, data stored in the cloud has been repatriated to on-premises systems when the cost of cloud services does not align with budgets as popular workloads scale to meet increased demand.

Choosing the right storage for the future is not a decision driven solely by place. It is the product of setting a new goal: enhancing an enterprise’s flexibility by providing it with access to on-demand scalability for capacity, unlimited performance and agility, and dramatically simplified management. Today’s decision-makers face new considerations as they adapt their storage to gain those benefits. Here are two ways to make the most of emerging hybrid storage infrastructure.

Achieve Cloud-Scale on Premises

Whether companies are retaining data for analytics, applications or regulatory reasons, they need appropriate places to place their exploding volume of data. The cloud can offer seemingly endless storage, however enterprises do have other options. The emergence of such large-scale and high-performing storage technology frees an organisation to make storage decisions based on what best fits the shape of its business requirements.

For example, many enterprises have significant legacy data silos on premises that are difficult to manage, costly to maintain, and are not up to the challenge of modern workloads, yet the data stored is also not sufficiently enough to migrate to the cloud. This scenario no longer needs to be a barrier, as it is possible to achieve cloud-like scalability while retaining control over data.

Storage as a Service (StaaS) – Opex Models Dominate

Operating expenditure (opex) acquisition models offer storage-as-a-service and continue to lower costs while enabling data-driven customers to take advantage of the latest storage technology. Platforms like the VSP 5000 offer a choice of consumption models via EverFlex from Hitachi that offer enterprises all the benefits of the newest storage technology without the burden of owning or managing the hardware. StaaS is another fast-growing trend highly influenced by the advantages of cloud.

How fast a company operates and adapts is a crucial determinant of competitive strength. In the past, scaling up the on-premises IT infrastructure to support new use cases such as analytics came at the cost of bottlenecks that slowed down overall performance. External cloud providers seemed attractive because they make it possible to buy more and more computing resources to keep pace with that need.

Today, however, that is no longer the only choice. New technologies such as NVMe storage and storage-class memory (SCM) offer on-premises storage options that don’t slow down at scale.

-- BERNAMA

Kelvin Tuan is Enterprise Solutions Director, ASEAN, at Hitachi Vantara.