In an increasingly fast-paced enterprise space, where decisions are made in a heart-beat and customers’ exceptional expectations stalk service providers – the quest for high-tech, high-performance support is growing. All the while Flash technology has been scaling down its capacity costs while turbo-charging its potency – and UK enterprises are finally taking note.
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After battling against barriers to Flash adoption, like the perceived high-costs and a lack of understanding among financial decision makers, it looks as though Flash has turned a corner. NetApp’s extensive survey of over 1000 UK IT decision makers delved into the deeper issues surrounding Flash adoption, business needs and perceptions of Flash. The findings demonstrate a remarkable shift in attitudes to Flash – most tellingly among small and medium businesses.
Almost two thirds of businesses are now supported by Flash technologies across the UK enterprise, an outstanding figure that highlights the drive for high-performance support – fuelled by today’s always-on generation. As businesses respond to the need for scalable infrastructure with the ability to consistently support services as demand peaks and troughs, it is unsurprising that almost one fifth of businesses say nothing will stop them from adopting Flash.
One of the more revealing findings from the study hints at the extent of the movement within the Flash market. While 55 percent of larger businesses have already adopted Flash technology, this is followed very closely by smaller businesses with a 53 percent adoption rate.
Meanwhile, medium-sized businesses were the strongest advocates of Flash with 61 percent saying they’ve adopted the technology. This is surely testament to the advances being made in educating businesses on the true value of Flash and strengthening the business case.
To see movement within the market from smaller and medium businesses is a positive indication of the deep rooted changes underway. It is perhaps symptomatic of today’s world, in which it is now widely accepted that to get ahead in business, you must make data your friend. This can only be done if you have the capacity to process and store data, with instant scalability and accessibility.
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To understand the move towards a Flash bound future, we must get a handle on precisely how businesses are applying the technology. According to NetApp’s findings, 53 percent of businesses need Flash to support high-performance storage.
Meanwhile, 40 percent need it to support high speed storage across multiple devices. In line with these needs, one-in-five businesses (18 percent) are deploying Flash technology to support payment processing and business intelligence applications – both of which require high performance storage and reliable access to data.
It appears the UK enterprise and Flash are on a path to synonymy, as the technology becomes increasingly integral to day-to-day business. In order to maintain competitive, by keeping the attention of their customers without any momentary glitches causing them to drop off, businesses need a highly consistent data management infrastructure. Performance is key and enterprises are acknowledging the longer-term benefits of streamlining workloads.
Gone are the days when Flash was considered too expensive and inaccessible to businesses. As big data boulders through Flash’s traditional barriers, reinforcing the need for high-performance storage, IT decision makers are more educated than ever – and financial decision makers are next on the agenda. Flash is the future of enterprise. Two thirds of the UK’s businesses are already living it.
Laurence James, Products, Alliances and Solutions Marketing Manager, NetApp NEMEA
Laurence is responsible for driving market awareness for NetApp’s products across Northern EMEA. Working closely with the EMEA Product, Alliances and Solutions Marketing team, his focus is on business growth and aligning NetApp’s offerings with customer and market needs.
Laurence works across all of NetApp’s product areas, and has an in-depth understanding of diverse customer requirements to deliver value across the entire range of the product suite. Leading the marketing activities, Laurence is responsible for ensuring that NetApp’s offering is market-leading, of the highest standard and guarantees customer ROI.
Working with a dedicated and experienced team, he assists in developing and implementing marketing campaigns that support the positioning of NetApp’s products and its reputation.
Laurence has many years’ experience working with all aspects of Enterprise IT and held roles at Oracle, Sun Microsystems and StorageTek.