5 ways intelligent storage can make your IT smarter

[StorageExperts]

Predictive analytics for your storage environment keeps the data flowing while knowledge workers focus on high-value objectives.

Intelligent storage is quickly making inroads into modern IT environments. When even the smallest enterprise finds itself awash in data from diverse sources—from employee emails to purchasing and inventory records to IoT sensor data—keeping track of it all is a herculean task. Making good use of it is even harder.

That's where intelligence comes in.

Predictive analytics is one of the leading intelligent applications being applied to storage. By leveraging big data and automated, intuitive processes, your enterprise can improve services, streamline infrastructure and resource consumption, and improve its competitive position in an increasingly fast-moving digital economy. In the emerging digital economy, many organizations are finding that the first order of business should be innovating, not babysitting for the data environment. Predictive analytics can help you do that.

Let's take a look at five of the key ways predictive analytics and intelligent storage can make your business better.

1. Simplified data management

Data is now generated and stored seemingly everywhere—in local data centers, on the cloud, on IoT edge devices—and it's becoming difficult for even an army of administrators to keep tabs on it all. AI-driven storage systems can ease that management burden.

These tools can analyze and classify large volumes of data in real time so that they can be moved and copied to appropriate storage sites, integrated with related data sets, and quickly parsed to deliver complete and accurate results for virtually any query. At the same time, workloads can be more closely aligned with available resources to provide smoother, more reliable data flow at lower operating costs.

2. Real-time adaptation

Today's intelligent storage platforms can intuitively adapt to changing data environments and user objectives without the manual recoding and systems integration required by previous-gen systems. This enables the enterprise to place resource utilization and optimization on a continuous upgrade path that requires little—if any—direct intervention by support staff.

This ability becomes more refined over time as the system acquires more data and further understands what constitutes optimal performance. Ultimately, this enables technical staff to offload the routine management of digital systems to the intelligent platform and focus their efforts on more productive purposes, such as investing in innovation and lowering costs.

3. Hybrid IT

Intelligent storage makes it easy to integrate and optimize disparate infrastructure as enterprises evolve from a single-data-center IT model to a hybrid cloud environment. Many organizations are spread too thin across too many clouds, most of which were created by business units in need of resources that they could not get from their IT departments. This, in turn, leads to security vulnerabilities, lost data, idle resources, and spiraling costs—the same issues that legacy siloed infrastructures face.

By harnessing all of this activity under an intelligent platform, the enterprise will be able to automatically tap the resources it needs when it needs them—and not a byte more—while maintaining coherent integrated policy management across the entire data ecosystem. This is a key step in converting the current capex model of hardware-centric IT to a consumption-based OpEx model that lowers costs and can be dynamically designed around desired outcomes.

4. Reduced risk

Intelligent storage is highly adept at streamlining normal operations, but it can also accurately predict responses to a host of operational factors, such as workload fluctuations and the effects of hardware and software changes to ongoing processes. For example, a clothing designer can be tipped off to a new fashion trend that can increase purchase data, or a systems technician can be alerted to imminent systems failures. This information removes much of the guesswork endemic to the business decision-making process, allowing organizations to reduce the risks inherent in normal business operations.

5. Data protection and security

Risk to data and data infrastructure is also reduced thanks to AI's ability to predict and prevent failures and to quickly restore systems to normal operating states when outages occur. AI-driven automated backup and recovery platforms remove much of the labor-intensive work from the daily requirements of disaster recovery even as they speed up recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives.

On the security front, AI has shown that it can analyze existing infrastructure for weaknesses, predict emerging threat trends, and adapt to shield itself from new forms of malware. At the same time, it provides greater flexibility in such functions as access control, data sharing, and collaboration, freeing up employees' time to concentrate on core business objectives.

Are you ready to implement intelligent storage?

For companies to undergo the digital transformation that's central to success in the coming decades, CIO writes, they must extract value from data, and AI-aided storage is key to that extraction. For today's enterprise, then, the decision to implement intelligent storage comes down to a simple question: Do you want your employees to spend their days—and your dollars—performing the routine tasks of storage and data management, or do you want them to create new initiatives and new sources of revenue?

Here are some additional articles to help guide your decision process:

Strategic storage is intelligent [enterprise.nxt]

AI-driven storage soars on the pay-as-you-go current [enterprise.nxt]

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Meet Around the Storage Block blogger and freelance content developer Arthur Cole. Arthur is a longtime industry journalist with more than 25 years of experience covering high-tech fields, ranging from professional audio and video to IT infrastructure, cloud, telecommunications, and B2B applications and services.

Storage Experts
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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