- Written by Ronan Carey, Senior Manager, Ireland Enterprise at Dell Technologies
The data universe is growing exponentially. It is estimated that there is currently 40 Zettabytes of data in the world and this will grow to 175ZB by 2025 when there will be more than five billion internet users.
And with more data comes more challenges, including how to collect, store, manage, move and analyse it to extract the most value.
With a tidal wave of information upon us, how businesses in Northern Ireland adapt their IT environments to this data surge will set the stage for the next era of digital transformation.
The introduction of Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) into organisations’ IT environments will enable them to collapse the traditional three-tier infrastructure by natively integrating compute, storage, networking, virtualisation, management and data services.
Besides reducing IT administrative tasks, it will also provide businesses across Northern Ireland with the ability to scale at their own pace, while reducing operating costs and providing flexibility as the foundation for multi-cloud approaches.
RELATED: Dell Technologies mark Security Awareness Month with top cyber tips
In the Dell Technologies 2020 Digital Transformation Index (DT Index), 80% of businesses globally have successfully accelerated at least some of their digital transformation programmes this year.
However, many organisations in Northern Ireland continue to be constrained by legacy infrastructure despite leaders recognising that accelerating the pace of transformation is key to enabling their business in 2021 and beyond.
HCI systems bring value to businesses by optimising efficiency and cutting down on operational costs. The sooner organisations take a hard look and re-evaluate their data centers, the sooner they can stand to benefit from this value—ultimately allowing them to do more, for less.
In the past, most Northern Irish businesses considering HCI solutions were those implementing new workload requirements. Today, that number is equalled by those planning a tech refresh.
Customers that have or plan to adopt HCI have said that Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), accelerated deployment, improved operational efficiencies, improved ability to scale and the reduction of infrastructure tasks are the top benefits they expect to realise when implementing it.
RELATED: SaltDNA: Securing your legal in-house data privacy
In the wake of unprecedented data growth, organizations are rapidly becoming aware of the benefits of multi-cloud. In the 2020 Dell Technologies DT Index, data management tools were ranked among the top three tech investments. Through engagement with our customers in Northern Ireland, we understand that cost and performance are the leading motivators behind this trend.
As businesses – large and small - arm their on-premises clouds to support and optimise IT infrastructures for multiple cloud types, they are looking for solutions that provide optimal performance, flexibility and, ultimately, management consolidations and simplification—all of which HCI offers.
We expect to see more organisations turning to HCI as operational hubs for multi-cloud approaches, prompted by the need to ensure that data and workloads are stored and managed in environments to suit the changing needs of the business.
