A cost-effective IT strategy is vital

Theo Odendaal, pre-sales manager for Hitachi Vantara, South Africa

It’s tough right now for businesses to find a silver lining amid the unprecedented social and economic upheaval. But as with any mega-world event, the current situation also presents opportunities that were not previously planned.

In fact, it’s oftentimes like these that provide businesses with a chance to reassess their current operations and innovate. This might involve the adoption of a new strategy or a complete business model reconstruction.

And so while many companies find themselves needing to adjust their IT spend to weather the economic storm, halting or slowing digital transformation projects at this time might not be the best plan. The importance of realising the combined value of digital transformation cannot be overstated, especially given digitalisation’s central role in tackling many of the challenges we face right at this moment.

Our economies, for example, have experienced a slowdown in productivity, placing a spotlight on the potential for digital technologies to help reignite that productivity. Digitalisation is the cause of large-scale and sweeping transformations across multiple aspects of business, providing unparalleled opportunities for value creation and capture.

Balancing digitisation with budget

But in order to take up the opportunities presented by digitalisation, companies need to be able to manage explosive data growth, complex applications and records retention requirements all under limited IT budgets. And the challenge of meeting the ever-increasing data storage and access requirements of critical applications must be balanced against the cost of the storage solution.

Though businesses of all sizes are facing this challenge, mid-sized enterprises are often the businesses with the toughest road ahead as they rarely have a wealth of IT resources to draw upon. While the demands placed upon their businesses—and therefore their IT groups—will require further adoption of storage networking, these very same demands consume so much time and so many resources that implementing any new solution will put a strain on already overtaxed assets.

Cost-effective data storage is key

But solutions designed specifically for budget-conscious and growing organisations, combined with a well thought out IT strategy, can give organisations the ability to respond to these uncertain times. A virtual storage platform, for example, enables organisations to cost-effectively meet their users’ current digital expectations, while also giving them the ability to address future challenges as application data needs and service levels evolve. There are solutions that offer organisations high performance and low latency as well as storage cost reductions. This delivers the speed and the resilience required to protect business continuity, flexibility and pay-per-usage, which is vital.

By paying only for what they use and aligning technology spending with business use, companies can reduce costs by up to 20% and eliminate the need to pay for reserve capacity.

Adjust - rather than halt

With the uncertainty we are facing today, now is the time to adjust rather than halt IT strategies. A modern data strategy is a roadmap to enable data-driven decision-making and applications that help an enterprise achieve its strategic imperatives.

A well-chosen digitalisation strategy not only covers the networking of machine systems, it can also optimise the interface to the customer and provide valuable approaches for the efficient networking of production and services. With this, digitisation, used correctly, offers an opportunity for new, profitable growth.

Midsize businesses that want to adapt, grow, and expand in these uncertain times will have to transform themselves through digitalisation. Digitalisation is key to innovation and innovation is imperative to mid-size enterprises looking to weather the current storm.