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"We now live in an instant economy - consumers expect instant services from
businesses. What is fast today will feel slow tomorrow. This is the new normal.
Every business is trying to adapt and requires data infrastructure that can deliver
instant outcomes,” said Sazzala Reddy, Datrium CTO and co-founder.

Companies that provide on-demand services to consumers, like Lyft, DoorDash and
Lugg, keep setting the bar higher for increasingly personalised service and instant
gratification. A parallel trend is taking hold in the on-demand enterprise1, defined
as “any company which leverages technology alongside its operations to deliver
intelligent, immediate interactions to both their employees and the customers they
interact with.”

To accelerate their speed of business to meet customer, partner and employee
expectations, enterprises are already leveraging ubiquitous virtualisation and
increasing their adoption of technologies like Kubernetes-but they need to do more.
With mission critical data distributed across on-premises and multiple public cloud
infrastructures, IT also needs a unified data management layer that delivers instant
access to data no matter where an application runs, along with consistent data
management, extreme application availability, a uniform experience and data mobility
across premises and multiple clouds.

IT transformation challenges inhibit digital transformation

The main driver of IT transformation for the on-demand enterprise is to improve the
customer experience, delighting external and internal customers. For digitally
native companies, digital transformation is built into their culture and business
models. Organisations not born in the digital age face the added challenge of
managing legacy applications, systems and business models that further constrain
their ability to transform. In fact, 41 percent of respondents in a recent Datrium
State of IT Transformation research study indicated that the time required to manage
legacy infrastructure is one of the most significant barriers preventing their
companies from reaching their IT transformation goals.

Reddy explained: “To manage data across its lifecycle, IT has to manage multiple
data services: primary storage, backup, disaster recovery, security and mobility.
Enterprises currently buy more than five products for these functions, which creates
silos and land-locks data. These separate products add operating friction and slow
down everything. The cloud is no different, as the same functions are needed and
data is siloed the same way. Data distributed across multiple clouds results in more
silos and no global organising principle. Data mobility across premises and public
clouds is an additional challenge. This rigidity combined with cost adds significant
friction to IT transformation.”

Several IT transformation problems inhibit digital transformation:

? Product sprawl has negative effects on cost, SLAs, risk management and business
agility.

? Workload immobility is simply not practical. Primary storage, backup, security,
mobility and DR orchestration products are land-locked and unable to move easily to
the cloud. Data services convergence and consistency across clouds are essential for
multicloud workload portability.

? Siloed data management, i.e., when data lives in separate silos, makes data
difficult to govern, secure, audit, analyse and search and to plan for growth.

IT transformation and the role of autonomous data services

We are standing at the dawn of a new era of autonomous systems. In this age of
reduction, modern technology should eliminate complexity. Who needs a complex
interface to do routine and repetitive operations in a world where, for example,
robots are already assisting surgeries, making them faster and safer? It is a time
for a wholesale reconsideration of underlying IT infrastructure to a newer model
that can run smoothly with autonomous data services. What is required is a shift
from traditional SANs and siloed point solutions for primary storage, backup and
disaster recovery to a new unified approach on a single platform that is converged
by design. Bolting-on data services - whether adding backup to primary storage or
vice versa - increases security vulnerabilities without fixing the core issues
around performance, scalability and data recovery.

“Imagine a ’drag-and-drop’ data centre. To enable this, we need a new convergence
model where all the data services move with the data, one that eliminates data silos
and uses machine intelligence to automate routine and repetitive tasks, providing
the horsepower to run business in real-time while liberating IT organisations from
complexity,” said Reddy. “Just as the smartphone eliminated the need for a
separate phone, camera, GPS and messaging device, an autonomous, multicloud data
infrastructure that provides universal data management obviates the need for
separate primary, backup, DR, encryption and mobility.”

Complete IT transformation can be achieved when:

? Data is not tethered to the infrastructure - IT organisations have the ability
to leverage any cloud and instantly move across premises and any cloud while having
a uniform experience

? There is massive simplification in operational environments - data can be
organised from birth to death with a unified platform for on-premises and cloud

? IT is liberated from complexity - organisations can define business intent with
global data policies, enabling autonomous data services to achieve them with zero
administrative touch

IT organisations are eager to attain next-level IT transformation. According to the
Datrium State of IT Transformation Survey Report, 86 percent of enterprises expect
to increase investment in IT transformation over the next five years and nearly 70
percent of respondents agree that it would be valuable to have their primary and
backup storage on a single platform that doesn’t require paying extra for backup
and managing a separate solution.

1 Jerry Chen, The On-Demand Enterprise