Emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT) and machine learning have changed the way businesses operate and what they need to thrive in a digital economy.
Digital transformation has been high on the executive agenda for some years, and for many, leveraging data has become an important force for value and revenue creation. This has emerged as an organizational superpower, as companies face change and uncertainty in their own client bases and in the global political and economic landscape.
According to a study in 24 Pure Storage countries, the biggest obstacles companies face to be truly digital are technical complexity and strategic uncertainty from an infrastructure point of view.
Revenue attributed to digital technologies
The study also reveals that digital solutions are becoming increasingly important in enterprises and generate about 47% revenue for organizations, either through customer-oriented or office-oriented applications. This makes it clear that digital transformation is no longer just a word that is in vogue, it is a reality that is happening.
By region, companies in NAM (North America) are earning 53% revenue from digital solutions, and in both EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) and APJ (Asia-Pacific) 46% of the revenue comes from the solutions Digital.
Also, according to Pure Storage’s report, the most commonly used digital solutions are internal communications platforms (75%),customer records management/purchase history (72%) and customer support (69%). The use of emerging technologies, such as real-time analytics (38%) and IoT (36%),is even lower.
Key factors driving adoption
The study highlights four key factors that drive the adoption of digital solutions in companies, the need to innovate quickly (53% ), generate cost savings for the business (51% ), respond to customer demand (49%) and create new business models (47%).
Technical complexity, RELIANCE on IT to deliver strategy, and lack of digital and leadership skills are the main barriers that make companies not use digital solutions, along with fundamentals such as storage are slowing the progress of digital transformation.
Solutions to deposit the workload
Today organizations have different options, like never before, to be able to choose how and where to run and deposit their workloads, but at the same time that this offers a great opportunity, it also creates a certain complexity and uncertainty for companies, especially when dealing with the pros and cons of different solutions.
According to the Pure Storage study, currently, on average, 41% of the workload are currently running on their own premises, using a traditional “On Premise” IT model, a much higher percentage than public clouds (Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform) with a 26% , and that private clouds, with a 24% . On average, globally, the research partners noted that 22% of their applications run through a Software-as-a-Service model.
On the other hand, according to the report, a 61% respondent thinks that the use of the public cloud will grow in the next 18-24% months, 52% of respondents think that the private cloud will be the one that grows, and the 35% believes that it will be the use of the IT model trad it’s idyllic.
Benefits Associated with the Cloud
An obvious momentum towards the public cloud can be seen, according to the respondents of the Pure Storage study, mainly due to cost savings (54%), its availability (50%) and its ease of use (50% ).
While on the contrary, security(47%) is one of the main drawbacks of the public cloud, following as another drawback the cost (29% ), suggesting that the costs associated with the public cloud are not as clear or not as convincing as customers may initially think.
In fact, a significant number of companies have moved their public cloud workloads to the traditional “On Premise” IT model (40% of the companies in North America and APJ have done so). In the EMEA region, the 65% says it has reduced public cloud usage in the last 12 months due to security issues.
The importance of data
Data enables and leads to digital transformation. In turn, digital transformation drives the production of more data, which in turn drives decision-making, further accelerating digital transformation.
Data is so important to organizations today that according to the Pure Storage study, 67% of EMEA’s companies, for example, think it should be shown as an asset on the company’s balance sheet.
More than half of EMEA’s companies also said that their company’s data is even more valuable than the people who work there (59%). However, data brings with it a number of challenges about how it is managed, collected, stored, and used. 62% of EMEA’s companies stated that unstructured data is putting pressure on storage.
As IoT and smart devices become more common, unstructured data will flood organizations, which could overwhelm existing storage solutions and have never been designed to handle such workloads.
Scott Dietzen, CEO of Pure Storage, says “emerging technologies have begun to embrace a true digital transformation, but companies are still present in a cycle of attraction and regret when it comes to the public cloud.”
