In this digital era, the ability of organisations to successfully transform and remain competitive depends on people, process and technology, all working together, seamlessly. By now though, most enterprises appreciate the imperative, as well as the potential, but are discovering that building a data-driven organisation is easier said than done. A recent report from McKinsey backs this up, indicating as many as 70% of transformation initiatives fail.
To move and scale with the speed to succeed, requires an end-to-end operational strategy, underpinned by cloud, together with a holistic approach to managing data so it can flow seamlessly throughout the organisation. This holistic view of data can enable new, more personalised customer touchpoints, uncover new business opportunities, optimise operations and ultimately, fuel innovation.
One of Gartner’s top data and analytics trends in 2019 was the concept of a Data Fabric, a term popularised by the hybrid cloud data services company, NetApp, back in 2014. Gartner defines ‘data fabric’ as enabling the ‘frictionless access and sharing of data in a distributed data environment. It enables a single and consistent data management framework, which allows seamless data access and processing by design across otherwise siloed storage’.
Why is this important? Well, given that most organisations now have some form of cloud deployment, (93 per cent of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy*) there is a competitive advantage to be gained in how organisations store, manage and act on their data across these distributed platforms. Getting this right in the move to cloud could be the difference between success and failure in your efforts to transform digitally.
Logicalis and NetApp, partnered with Webjet last year to address the silos in their organisation that were hindering their innovation and transformation journey. The organisations IT department was spending all its time managing tickets and ad hoc requests plus managing employee and customer data across multiple clouds. Logicalis used NetApp’s data fabric to dedupe the data sprawl across the mountain of unmanageable data across on-premise, Azure, Google Cloud, and moved to one single instance. This reduced IaaS costs made the data available in real-time to provide insights to the leadership team, plus it reduced IT spend by 10% and freed up IT headcount by 80% so the team could focus on innovation.
Logicalis and NetApp are helping businesses establish a foundation for simplifying and integrating the orchestration of data services, with the freedom to use any compute environment, in any combination across hybrid, multi-cloud environments.
The NetApp approach to delivering a single experience to hybrid cloud environments reduces the cost, time, risk, and personnel needed to support a cloud initiative. The lift-and-shift process eases because the underlying storage is the same, and it allows freedom of choice to move to any cloud or data centre with one set of data to port.
Cloud transformation done the right way – in record time
By including NetApp storage costing in our Cloud Readiness Assessment, Logicalis provides real-world sizing estimates and a transformation roadmap that allows you to set-up and manage your Azure cloud at speed in a controlled and compliant way while minimising cost.
If you’re clear on your transformation goals but need to understand what the roadmap budget looks like and how to get there, contact Logicalis for a Cloud Readiness Assessment today.
If you’d like to expand your thinking further on the topic of cloud, check out our whitepaper on taking a growth mindset to cloud adoption.
