It’s a stereotype, I know, but when many people think of their organisation’s IT department they imagine a team set apart from the real operations of the company, detached from top-level goals and not that relevant to their daily business (except of course when their email goes down and then all hell breaks loose).
By working with IT teams so closely, the channel understands how crucial technology is for most businesses today: deploy the wrong software, hardware or application and things can go horribly wrong, horribly quickly. The right technology doesn’t simply prevent problems; it can save money, cut energy consumption and even bridge the gap between IT and the rest of the organisation.
As the party that designs, implements and supports solutions, resellers are well-placed to help IT administrators give our non-tech friends a much better understanding of IT’s crucial role in their organisation. And storage, with technologies such as Thin Provisioning, data management software and intelligent auto-tiering, is the perfect starting point.
Storage has come a long way since everything was placed on a hard drive and forgotten about – it’s fast, clever and intuitive. Today it can have a direct impact on an organisation’s bottom line, giving a competitive edge and even aiding its growth strategy.
But while this is great news for the company, the IT department still sees the growth in storage requirements as one of the largest drains on its budget. The department’s new technologies may eliminate capacity wastage and the related cost, but when it comes to the financial outlay, the burden is usually on the IT department even when other parts of the organisation benefit.
How can we change this? How can vendors and resellers help IT teams lighten the financial load of storage?
The answer lies in the features offered by today’s storage solutions: generally, administrators can allocate resources to different users but the devil is in the detail. Different products have varying levels of control over how the capacity is split. The key is in allowing the administrator to clearly and accurately see how much storage is allocated and where. Once this information is available each user effectively becomes a cost centre, charged for the capacity they use.
This is where the channel can help its customers: a new storage array no longer has to be a drain on the IT budget but rather a pre-paid resource the IT team can bill its users for. The kit starts to pay for itself the moment it goes into production.
This approach also helps to identify which areas of the business use the most storage, so work can be done to reduce wastage and ineffective planning. It’s also easier to see which data is accessed quickly and often, and which data is really just archived, helping with future plans to organise the storage capacity.
Businesses need to bridge the gap between the IT department and other parts of the organisation. And that’s not just because it would be nice if everyone got along.
A recent report by analyst Forrester says there’s a big risk the IT team will purchase kit that doesn’t address business demands, and that the wider organisation is unaware of technology in place. Bad news for both teams, meaning missed opportunities to drive revenue and grow market share. A better understanding can bring about increased speed to market and improved customer satisfaction.
And there’s more. Positioned at the heart of the business, the IT department can help other parts of the business too. With better access to data, customer insight and competitor analysis become much easier.
The channel is perfectly placed to help the IT department do this. Becoming a crucial part of future business planning and dynamic part of the workings of an organisation can only be a good thing. And it can be done with just a little help from the right kind of data storage.
