Businesses must have a sound and scalable mechanism of data storage to manage this valuable asset. This is where modern data storage solutions come in.
With modern technologies, including cloud, AI, and machine learning, modern data storage products and solutions can now face the limitations of legacy systems head-on. They provide a load of benefits that your business can easily gain to stay on the bright side of the competition.
Let’s explore 8 essential benefits that modern data storage solutions provide for organisations of all sizes.
1. Unlimited Scalability on Demand
An especially beneficial characteristic of modern data storage product systems is their natural scalability, which helps businesses when their requirements keep changing. But in contrast, using classical storage methods, multiplying capacity usually involved buying additional hardware, which was costly and required a lot of time.
- The flexibility of cloud facilities’ capacity, which can quickly scale up storage with a few clicks to meet requirements, enables modern solutions. Consequently, enterprises will never run short of storage space as their data grows, regardless of how fast it’s expanding. There is a high degree of scalability for solutions in terms of computing efficiency, and thus they can even handle the most resource-intensive workloads.
- Another advantage of the push model is that the cloud-based pay-as-you-go model allows organisations to simply pay for only the storage they use, avoiding over-provisioning of capacity.
The quick moldability and elastic scalability unique to private storage have given rise to the trend of cutting costs and saving time, which is found to be incompatible with legacy systems.
2. Total Flexibility to Deploy Anywhere
Closely related to scalability is the flexibility that modern storage solutions provide. Traditional storage silos often came with rigid protocols and were not optimised to support a variety of workloads and applications.
Modern solutions embrace multi-cloud and hybrid cloud architectures that allow data to be stored, managed and accessed seamlessly both on-premises and in the cloud. This brings much-needed flexibility for businesses to choose deployment models based on their unique needs.
For example, latency-sensitive workloads can run on-premises, while backup and archival storage can leverage the cloud. Data can also be tiered automatically between storage mediums based on access patterns. The decoupling of storage from hardware also enables it to be consumed via APIs, further improving flexibility.
3. Significant Cost Savings Through Scalable Pay-As-You-Go Model
Cost optimisation is a top priority for businesses, and modern data storage product solutions clearly score highly on this aspect. By shifting to an operational expenditure model and paying only for what is used, organisations can better predict and control storage spending.
Storage solutions that leverage data reduction technologies provide additional cost benefits. Deduplication and compression can reduce the physical storage footprint by as much as 90% by eliminating redundant data. Artificial intelligence is also being used to intelligently manage storage tiers for maximum efficiency.
Migrating to cloud-based storage is shown to reduce overall storage costs by up to 50% compared to maintaining on-premises systems. And multi-cloud architectures allow further optimisation by enabling workloads to run where they are most cost-effective.
4. Carrier-Grade Availability
Modern data is mission-critical to business operations and even minutes of downtime can have significant financial and reputational impacts. This is why high availability is a key requirement of data storage infrastructure.
- Traditional systems relying on single points of failure were prone to outages.
- Modern data storage products address this challenge through their distributed architecture and use of techniques like replication, erasure coding and auto-tiering across failure domains.
Cloud providers also guarantee 99.99% availability for object storage through their robust infrastructure, which spans multiple availability zones within a region and even across regions. On-premises solutions provide comparable availability guarantees through clustering.
5. Fortified Security With Military-Grade Protections
With data becoming the most valuable corporate asset, security is an understandably major concern, especially as attack surfaces continue to expand. Modern data storage products address this by offering robust access controls and data protection capabilities.
Multi-factor authentication, encryption of data at rest and in transit using keys that customers fully control, activity monitoring and alerting are some key security hygiene practices supported. Data classification and automatic tiering to most secure layers based on sensitivity further strengthen protection.
Compliance with industry standards like HIPAA, GDPR, etc. is assured through documented controls and certifications. Immutable storage options also defend against ransomware by preventing unauthorised modification of data.
6. Deep Business Insights From Data Analytics & Reporting
Beyond just storing data, modern solutions are designed to extract real business value from stored information through analytics capabilities.
- Storage platforms now come equipped with data lakes where raw and processed data can be stored for analysis.
- AI and machine learning are leveraged to gain actionable insights from these vast datasets.
- Custom reports, visualisations and automated anomaly detection help businesses optimise operations, detect fraud, improve customer experiences and much more.
Data stored in these solutions also becomes accessible to a wider range of analytics and BI tools for deeper exploration.
Read Also: Top Strategies to Maximize Your Return on Investment (ROI) with a SAN
7. Automation and Optimisation
Modern data storage products incorporate extensive automation, which not only improves efficiency but also optimises resource utilisation and lowers operational costs.
- Data management functions like tiering, data protection, and disaster recovery are also automated based on policies.
- AI-driven optimisation continuously learns usage patterns and workload profiles to ensure resources are allocated optimally.
Automation brings transparency to storage operations and frees up administrators for higher-value tasks. It also helps maintain compliance and ensures SLAs are consistently met through policy-driven management.
8. Built-In Innovation With Open Architecture
Finally, one of the biggest advantages of modern data storage products is their ability to quickly embrace new and emerging technologies. Traditional systems tended to become obsolete much faster due to their closed and proprietary nature.
This future-proofs the storage investment and allows businesses to gain competitive advantage through early adoption of disruptive technologies. It also ensures data remains accessible and manageable for many years to come, avoiding expensive forklift upgrades of legacy systems.
Final Words
Storage infrastructure is a critical success factor for organisations. While traditional methods served us well, modern data storage solutions have completely transformed what is possible through their scalability, flexibility, cost benefits, security posture, analytics prowess and automation.
Leveraging these advanced solutions allows businesses to stay ahead of the curve and extract true value from their data assets. It is clear that any organisation still relying on outdated storage is at a serious disadvantage.
Read Also: The Pitfalls of Crowd-Sourced Logo Design