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By Shawn Rosemarin, VP, Product Management, É«¿Ø´«Ã½

Should accessible, flexible data storage be high on the list of IT must-haves? Yes, if you plan on using AI to gain competitive advantage. In today¡¯s world, taking storage for granted can hold you back in a big way.

What keeps executive leaders up at night¡ªor gets them up and at their desks in the early morning? How, where, and why to adopt AI is likely top of mind. They can¡¯t afford not to care about artificial intelligence. In our new ¡°The Innovation Race¡± survey, 80% of CIOs and other IT leaders said they¡¯re worried that their business will be left behind if their infrastructure can¡¯t support AI fast enough.

Shoring up infrastructure for AI applications is a big (and growing) concern. In 2024, what are the chances leaders shrug when you ask how they¡¯re preparing to adopt AI? Probably zero. They already know the risk and cost of taking data security for granted¡ª and tremendous reputational damage¡ªso security is rarely an afterthought.?

But ask the same group where data storage ranks and you might get a blank look. Storage? That¡¯s just infrastructure¡ªthe business of IT teams and database admins, right??

Wrong. Storage is much more than an IT commodity these days. Taking storage for granted can hold companies back from AI success and even introduce major risks¡ªwhich should be enough to keep any leader up at night.

The catchphrase ¡°data is the new oil¡± has been around for almost 20 years, and the sentiment is truer than ever. AI has an insatiable appetite for data. I¡¯m not only talking about static, structured data, like spreadsheets and tables. AI is gobbling up video, audio, behavioral, and streaming data.?

Today¡¯s data isn¡¯t the store-it, protect-it, and forget-it liability of yesterday. Yesterday¡¯s data infrastructure won¡¯t cut it, either, and believe me, executive leaders are worried about this. In ¡°The Innovation Race¡± survey, 81% of CIOs and IT leaders believe that AI-generated data is likely to outgrow their organization¡¯s current data centers. And 98% agree that their organization¡¯s

infrastructure needs improvement to support risk and innovation initiatives.

If CTOs and CIOs really want to get more from their data, they¡¯ll need a powerful ¡°engine¡± running behind the numbers. Speed matters. Stability matters. Opportunities need to be seized in ¡°real time.¡±?

The problem: Legacy infrastructures weren¡¯t built for this purpose. They weren¡¯t built to extend to the cloud or to support data that delivers against today¡¯s reality.

What¡¯s the solution? You might invest in tools and talent to harvest and store all this data. Overnight ¡°batch processing¡± helps, but it won¡¯t deliver results fast enough. And raw speed alone won¡¯t get it done. Without a modern storage platform that embraces real-time performance, flexibility, and the public cloud, you¡¯ll struggle to get ambitious projects off the ground.

Your modern data storage platform should be:?

• Flexible: Allows for simple, 100% non-disruptive upgrades and no data migration risk?
• Consumed as a service: Enables business leaders to build and migrate workloads where it serves them best, with no technical debt to worry about?
• Secure and accessible: Ensures that services are available when you need them and always guarded from external threats
• Easily shareable: Accelerates value creation across departments and platforms
• Common architectures to promote better ¡°data hygiene¡±: Eliminates the data silos that typically get in the way of insights
• Software-defined and multicloud-enabled: Allows for a common set of data services and is built for modern applications across any hardware and any cloud

Think back to the priority of data security. If data storage¡¯s journey to ¡°respectability¡± is akin to cybersecurity¡ªwhich used to be a somewhat misunderstood cost center¡ªstorage should matter in the same way. But rather than reputation-damaging attacks, the risks of inadequate storage in today¡¯s AI-driven landscape include silos, bottlenecks, overspend, and barriers that wreak havoc on your best intentions.?

Data security and AI are board-level concerns discussed at C-level meetings. Data storage should be, too¡ªand potentially even more so with its potential to accelerate innovation and launch new revenue streams.?

Learn more about what your peers think about the role of data storage when facing challenges like AI and cyber resiliency. Read ¡°The Innovation Race¡± survey.