IT at the Crossroads

By Ajay Singh, Chief Product Officer, Pure Storage

We’re at a fundamental turning point in data infrastructure.

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) combined with an increasing risk of cyberthreats, a push to modernize applications, and emerging sustainability initiatives are driving fundamental changes in IT strategy. This is all happening as organizations must remain focused on balancing costs and innovation to stay competitive. How are successful IT leaders responding to these challenges?

The past decade of digital transformation, which made data the lifeblood of every organization, offers us some important lessons on how to thrive in this time of change. One lesson is that a fresh perspective is needed to be successful. Many successful IT leaders cast aside old ideas about infrastructure and adopted new ways of thinking to solve new challenges of scale, speed, and complexity. These leaders leveraged emerging trends, like virtualization and the public cloud, to accelerate–or even make possible–their successful transformation efforts.

They are instead turning to new ideas in data storage to thrive in the age of AI, cyberthreats, and other challenges.

AI, in particular, represents a fundamental shift in how we store and capitalize data, placing a tremendous strain on data infrastructures. In a recent survey of 1,500 IT leaders, 80% said that they are worried that their business will be left behind if their infrastructure can’t support AI fast enough¹.

Data storage systems were once selected for individual use cases like databases and applications. But this approach left many organizations with a patchwork of disparate, siloed data stores. To leverage that same data for GenAI projects at scale, organizations must break down these silos, so that AI models can be fed. The complexity that goes along with a patchwork of different systems, each with their own management interfaces and limited scalability, presents even more roadblocks to AI success.

This complexity also hinders the push toward cyber resiliency. Data security often must be applied on each system via manual patching, which increases the potential for human error and presents a larger cyber “attack surface”—all of which can lead to vulnerabilities.

The new ideas in data storage, which solve these problems and many more, revolve around a few key principles.

• Unified storage pools: A common, powerful, and highly efficient data platform that works across multiple use cases and is accessible through flexible APIs is needed to deliver the simplified data consolidation at scale organizations require.
• Consistent management experience: A common architecture and interface, across hybrid cloud and on-premises data infrastructure, simplifies data management, access and security. This empowers IT staff to manage larger, more varied data stores with much less effort.
• Automated self-service: Empowering data users with secure provisioning and access simplifies operations and drives down costs while increasing user satisfaction. As a result, data maintenance becomes almost invisible, enabling generalists to manage it all.
• AI-enabled optimization and automation: Simplified or fully automatic processes for optimizing performance, uptime, and data security free up IT staff to work on more value-add projects.
• Eliminating downtime and system disruptions: A data platform should be designed to scale and be upgraded continuously without the constant disruption required by legacy storage. After all, hyperscalers don’t take your systems offline for an upgrade. None of your infrastructure should be constrained like that—whether in the cloud or on-premises.

These are the principles that we designed our Pure Storage platform around—a data platform that has helped thousands of organizations thrive as they face the challenges and changes of both today and tomorrow.

To learn more about thriving in the face of change, read “The Future Of Storage: New Principles for the AI Age.”

¹ “The Innovation Race: Reducing Risk and Navigating the AI Frontier for Future Success”, from Vanson Bourne and Pure Storage, June, 2024