This post is sponsored by Samsung Business. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
In the “old days”—about five to 10 years ago in this industry—IT specialists focused on storage, which was expensive, demanding, and took up physical space via server rooms and extensive wiring. With the growth of cloud computing and rapid on-demand accessibility, data storage and accessibility are no longer issues. But if your enterprise is focused on old storage methods, you could be losing momentum by the minute. It’s true that compliance might require certain data to be maintained in a private or hybrid environment, but if you aren’t proactively converting bulky, outdated storage methods to new, streamlined options—particularly the cloud—you’ll lose ground to on-the-ball competitors as each day passes.
So what are your competitors’ IT specialists doing, if not worrying about storage? They’re focusing on optimizing all the data and analytics and figuring out how to best share and use the information for business growth.
Discover the Fruits of Digital Storage Labor
With cloud technologies, we no longer need to focus our IT energies on storage. We can allocate IT resources to finding the best ways to engage with that data and exploring the benefits of immediate access, total flexibility, and real-time responsiveness that come with cloud storage technologies. Cloud speaks the language of today’s business needs and makes the old IT storage model a moot point.
The fruits of digital storage practices become increasingly apparent as new innovations hit the market. Data storage becomes the base upon which marketing tools like analytics, insights, and intelligence—all predictive in nature—are built, and offers an unparalleled wealth of information at the fingertips of business execs and marketers. Turning hardcopy files into digitized data in the cloud enables businesses to use the information to create charts, graphs, and in-depth analytics to predict future objectives.
What You Should Be Thinking About
Businesses need to stop getting caught in the trap of creating new obsolescence. Managing your IT resources using an outdated way of thinking leads to wasted resources, time you can’t get back, and energy spent on storage efforts that could set your business back by years. Instead, smart businesses know their IT departments shouldn’t be focusing on how to store information, but on how a profit can be gained from using the information.
Agile, flexible businesses are primed to become the top dogs of their industries in a matter of years or months. Instead of expanding storage, businesses need to strive to become nimble and responsive in a constantly evolving market, where significant changes in how we do business occur at unprecedented speeds. With unprecedented access to data in real time, businesses need to spot opportunities and act on them almost instantaneously.
Cloud technologies free businesses up from the resource drain that Legacy IT previously had, enabling businesses to make the shift to using the data they have to improve business. The old IT model focused on attaining competitive advantages, while the new model acknowledges the need to seize opportunities in the market, capitalize on them, and skillfully jump to the next opportunity.
Cloud storage allows businesses to move forward unencumbered by old IT assets that no longer have any value, eliminating unnecessary costs, useless IT equipment, and old-fashioned ways of thinking. Those businesses that are unwilling to change or are ignorant of modern technologies will undoubtedly feel the burn of being left behind.
Be a Business of Tomorrow
Tomorrow’s top businesses jumped onboard with cloud storage before you’d even heard of it. They’re discovering the best ways to deploy these systems (i.e., integrating it at the executive level) and are reaping the benefits of virtual information: Streamlining enterprise-wide communication, facilitating digital transformation, and enabling effortless scalability.
As cloud adoption becomes the norm for businesses everywhere, administrators need to make changes within their organizations to accommodate new roles, new business models, and new data possibilities. Business leaders need to gain the skills and tools necessary to manage a variety of different cloud platforms moving into the future and drop the old way of thinking about data storage.
Regardless of where your business sits on the cloud adoption curve, you need to actively engage with cloud computing and begin to make the switch as soon as possible.
Allocating staff members, intellect, budget dollars, and other resources to enterprise storage is a complete waste of energy. In a market where time is literally money, don’t waste yours on efforts that became obsolete with the introduction of cloud storage technologies.
The IT departments of tomorrow (and today!) need to focus not on the storage and management of data, but on the utilization of data utilizing data to generate helpful and predictive information.
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Daniel Newman is the Principal Analyst of Futurum Research and the CEO of Broadsuite Media Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise. From Big Data to IoT to Cloud Computing, Newman makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology projects, which leads to his ideas regularly being cited in CIO.Com, CIO Review and hundreds of other sites across the world. A 5x Best Selling Author including his most recent “Building Dragons: Digital Transformation in the Experience Economy,” Daniel is also a Forbes, Entrepreneur and Huffington Post Contributor. MBA and Graduate Adjunct Professor, Daniel Newman is a Chicago Native and his speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.