Intelligent or Smart Storage - Key to Business Innovation

1. Market Research Services WHITEPAPER Intelligent / Smart Storage - Key to Business Innovation

2. Intelligent/Smart Storage - Key to Business Innovation Introduction: How ‘data’ is driving innovation? Businesses and industries worldwide are currently experiencing a complex world that is characterised by the dispersal of new digital technologies, which is affecting both their performance and productivity, while causing disruption. Therefore, agile seems to be the new way to compete, where organizations are significantly focusing on innovation to discover new capabilities, meet changing consumer demands, customize offerings, and stay competitive. The vast availability of data (generated from modern devices, applications, and software) is also helping organizations realize its finite benefits, which includes the unearthing of its value with different modes of utilization and the many intelligent insights that can be drawn from it. However, its vastness and pace of growth is still a huge barrier for businesses to access and interpret. The right approach to innovation for any organization, therefore, calls for a modern and smart/intelligent approach to handling storage, which includes everything from hardware, software, the cloud, and a more responsive IT. Addressing storage issues allows businesses to save time, costs, and resources, while allocating them to innovative projects and focusing on detecting and resolving storage concerns. Why innovation is critical for businesses? Digitization is changing everything, right from accelerating innovation to even blurring industry boundaries. As a result, digital platforms have become critical for the expansion of industries. An example is the Chinese insurance company PingAn, which set off many innovative businesses, including the OneConnect that builds and sells financial technology solutions in products, services, sales, operations, and risk management globally. not able to rid itself of its traditional functional duties, such as deploying and managing new hardware and software systems, and cybersecurity. In other cases, organizations struggle to scale digital innovation or do not even emphasize the need to mine insights from the vast pools of data. IT, as a result, is still evolving and focusing more on modernizing its applications and infrastructure, and on adopting an intelligent approach to operations to support innovation and value creation in its core business activities. An organization’s innovation strategy, and especially that for a capital-project company, also relies heavily upon its IT function to deliver the devices and technologies required to enhance user experience. However, IT is still Innovation Intelligence Innovation Intelligence is the logical approach to augment an organization’s innovation process, implying that it enables organizations to deliver high-value products, while maximizing its return on investment via a comprehensive innovation strategy. 2

3. Intelligent/Smart Storage - Key to Business Innovation Key drivers of innovation - AI and ML will drive business automation • Transition to digital-first - Digital is sweeping across all industries and value chains, despite challenges related to outdated activities and skepticism around implementing the right digital solutions. As a result, businesses are required to quickly adapt and scale to the needs of a changing market. However, transitioning to digital solutions all at once is difficult, as most organizations do not foresee an operating model that supports digitization or innovation. Instead, digital efforts are considered as additional strategies rather than their core strategies. Therefore, the organization’s processes and structures do not change or complement a digitized environment. As a result, very few leaders have been able to tap into digital initiatives, while others do not receive the necessary training for deploying new tools, managing digital initiatives, and troubleshooting issues. Experts state that addressing these issues will require a dramatic shift in the organizational structure, corporate culture, and talent management. - Most digital teams that deliver have been targeting three areas—analytics to analyze performance and operations, which also helps in deriving intelligent insights for decisive action; rapidly testing and implementing new software and hardware; and thirdly, creating and installing digital products and processes that can be standardized and leveraged by all organizations. Additionally, the teams also conduct periodic evaluations of innovation after their use and phase out solutions if they do not add value to the organization. - Today, most businesses are integrating digital roles in their existing functions and not in separate units. Moreover, the size of businesses plays a critical role in ascertaining where to allocate the specific digital roles. For instance, a small organization may not have the staff to deploy many digital teams, compared to large, globally established players. challenge for organizations implementing AI and ML, therefore, is to offer high-performing storage at scale and within budget. - The best kind of storage for such emerging technologies are the block-access storage that supports data centralization and enhanced features, file or object- based storage that is developed to scale and support applications like the internet of things (IoT), and cloud storage that offers low upfront costs and flexibility. Storage suppliers usually advise looking at the business needs and objectives behind the project, as well as its future requirements. - AI and ML have also pushed the levels of automation across industries, especially in mining where driverless vehicles are used to avoid accidents and injuries at hazardous work sites. AI and ML-enabled robots are also expected to perform a variety of tasks with the help of human assistance. - While AI and ML innovations gain momentum, there is increasing hope that these technologies itself can help overhaul storage and deployment challenges. AI-driven storage systems offer real-time updates from varied data sources that enables workflow automation and reduces human intervention. Some advantages of AI-driven storage, include: • ability to scale up to business requirements, • reduces downtime issues, • offers data-driven insights, • automates storage facilities, • mitigates data-storage failures, • seamless detection of failures and quick data recovery, and • cuts costs, as AI-led storage helps detect data use patterns, thereby supporting decisions related to unwanted data filtration, data supervision, and data storage. • Enhanced customer experiences - A key driver for business innovation is customer satisfaction. As a result, organizations are focused at improving their offerings, as well as rethinking and redesigning it to suit customers’ needs. For instance, unified storage allows customers to customize their platform for their needs by adding capacity and performance, both easily and freely. • AI and ML systems to push innovation - Right from self-driving cars to customer service bots, AI and ML will transform significant areas of the society. However, these technologies consume large volumes of data, thereby exerting new and extreme pressures on IT systems sometimes, especially storage. As a result, developers are looking to even connect storage directly to GPUs today. The 3

4. Intelligent/Smart Storage - Key to Business Innovation Infrastructure complexity is slowing innovation The ever-increasing volumes of data is forcing organizations to approach storage differently and more uniquely. Most organizations believe that the unstructured pool of data is too expensive to access, preserve, and develop. Therefore, businesses need to evaluate their data, and ensure that the relevant data meets all compliance checks to mitigate the storage complexities that is both slowing their operations and digital efforts. • Modern, smart storage systems should be highly scalable, flexible, simple, secure, and automated across the organization’s cloud and edge environments and on-premises. • It should be effective in predicting anomalies, evaluating performance, and detecting issues with systems. Smart storage is adding more value to businesses Smart or intelligent storage allows organizations to discover the value of their data, which leads to more consistency and scalability of their IT operations. In other words, intelligent storage systems gather information from the environment, and adjust accordingly to its demands. As a result, the smart storage approach predicts and deters issues, optimizes workloads, and enhances productivity and performance. Cloud-based intelligence enables smart monitoring across sites Automated data indexig, analytics and recovery SMART STORAGE Data security and Effectually detects and rectifies issues integrity Responsive to shifting workloads and key business objectives Improves data placement 4

5. Intelligent/Smart Storage - Key to Business Innovation Benefits of intelligent storage Intelligent storage provides IT teams with greater operational control, flexibility, and time to focus on critical areas. Uses technologies to yield better insights Optimizes performance Technologies help analyze data from combined storage systems, establishing specific patterns and deviations. This allows systems to scale up and out independently. Insights collected from modern data can improve IT operations and also detemines how new workloads interact with existing ones, while AI-driven insights can predict how they will and how those workloads can be optimized. Predictive and proactive Mitigates security risks Leverages analytics and smart monitoring to predict and proactively fix issues in advance, and even beyond and above the storage layer and in the bigger ecosystem to actively prevent its entry into the storage layer. AI and ML provide alogrithms with the data needed to analyze risks and detect patterns that helps systems to recommend workarounds, thereby preventing big cybersecurity risks. Future of data storage and sustainability New data storage solutions are developing at breakneck speed today. Additionally, factors such as cross-sector issues like sustainability and data security, growth of data and disruptive technologies, and the fruition of deployment models across the internet of things (IoT), edge, and between the far edge and cloud data centers, are defining the growing needs of data storage. Storage technology is driven by factors, such as cost, density, interface speed, and capacity where both hard disk and solid-state drive (SSD) makers are either guaranteeing enhanced reliability, or increased storage capacities at lower costs. Meanwhile, novel approaches to data storage technologies are having to tackle the problem of climate change and energy crisis, alongside the already known inefficiencies of legacy storage solutions to keep pace with the massive, complex, unstructured data. This implies that intelligent data storage needs to deliver both performance as well as energy efficiency goals. 5

6. Intelligent/Smart Storage - Key to Business Innovation Data storage innovation Innovations in data storage are likely to be motivated by the following trends: • Decentralized networks The emergence of distributed ledger technologies (DLT) and blockchain are paving the way for data to be stored in decentralized storage networks. These networks will become the basis for next generation Web 3.0, a much-anticipated vision of a distributed and open Web that is yet to arrive. As a result, the capacity of decentralized storage (DeStor) networks is constantly growing to accommodate more data today. • Object storage Enterprises are increasingly adopting object stores to increase capacity, which has numerous benefits over traditional stores like scalability and the absence of hierarchy in data structures. Object stores provide the intelligence included in data sets that storage systems benefit from the most, while offering economies of scale and performance in scenarios like new application development and block storage. • Orchestrated, provisioned storage Container deployment and its interoperability function allows organizations the flexibility to move to the multi-cloud. This shift from manual to orchestrated storage offers better use of storage hardware, while handling quality of service with the help of storage abstractions. • Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) Large investments in quantum computers and technologies are expected to cause new security risks in classical cryptography in the near future. As a result, PQC, a new category of algorithms, is being built and regulated to diminish these threats. • Fabric computing Fabric computing or unified computing will continue to assist disaggregated infrastructure to deliver economies of scale in meeting shifting workloads. For instance, the NVMe (non-volatile memory express), NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF), and NVMe over Fiber Channel (NVMe/FC) all allow the optimization of workloads to maximum throughput capacity and quick response times for managing all kinds of business workloads. Smart and resilient storage architectures reduce human intervention, while at the same time allowing for more growth and innovation breakthroughs for businesses. The future, therefore, belongs to innovators who can adapt and succeed with changing data demands and opportunities. Most importantly, intelligent storage systems will have to serve remarkable storing capabilities along with logical, useful, and significant insights that are pre-emptive in identifying and settling issues, as well as minimizing risks, spotting irregularities, and permitting powerful predicting. 6

7. Intelligent/Smart Storage - Key to Business Innovation About the Author PRARTHNA TIGA • Senior Analyst - Product – iNAVA Prarthna Tiga is part of the Business Operations, technology data intelligence team at SG Analytics. She has over 7 years of experience in market research and publishing. Prior to joining SG Analytics, she was part of the technology and media teams at GlobalData. Prarthna holds a Master’s degree in English Literature and a Bachelor’s degree in Commerce. She is keen about charitable services, and is an avid reader, traveller, and sports enthusiast and can be found playing basketball or badminton in her free time. Disclaimer This document makes descriptive reference to trademarks that may be owned by others. The use of such trademarks herein is not an assertion of ownership of such trademarks by SG Analytics (SGA) and is not intended to represent or get commercially benefited from it or imply the existence of an association between SGA and the lawful owners of such trademarks. Information regarding third-party products, services, and organizations was obtained from publicly available sources, and SGA cannot confirm the accuracy or reliability of such sources or information. Its inclusion does not imply an endorsement by or of any third party. Copyright © 2022 SG Analytics Pvt. Ltd. www.sganalytics.com GET IN TOUCH Pune | Hyderabad | Bengaluru | London | Zurich | New York | San Francisco | Toronto | Amsterdam | Wroclaw 7