Click to learn more about author Eran Brown.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created shockwaves around the world. Businesses are working hard to overcome supply shock, demand shock, and credit shock — in whatever order they experience them.

Many businesses are also facing IT infrastructure shock, the sudden and immense challenge of having to create and build a new IT strategy that supports an ever-evolving business climate.

IT budgets have been frozen or shrunken, so changing nothing and hoping for the best is not an option. The question is no longer “Should we change strategies?” but rather, “What should we change first?”

Strategy for the New Normal

The typical sales model of prepaying for IT infrastructure to cope with potential long-term challenges is no longer realistic. Instead, keeping the company’s cash available for strategic investments, particularly in the face of the widely anticipated economic downturn, is the order of the day.

Bearing all this in mind, it is important to focus on new initiatives and product development, to enable more responsive and agile systems. In our case, that means increasing storage capacity for our customers to accommodate online or remote working, whilst also streamlining business units and harnessing new toolsets, for example.

An effective IT infrastructure plays a crucial role in delivering both cost savings and business efficiency. IT teams are under pressure to adapt to changing business requirements, internally and externally.

We’ve worked hard to address the most pressing challenges for organizations like the increased data growth that comes with the transition to digital transactions many businesses are experiencing due to social distancing and quarantines. This has caused these businesses to grow their storage infrastructure without being able to physically access their data centers and introduces additional problems like keeping pace with application performance growth and data protection.

Some have turned to the cloud to gain the agility needed to support remote working operations, but cloud services and solutions come at a substantial premium, especially at a time when companies are trying to reduce costs. Moving to the cloud may seem like the best way to postpone a bigger IT investment in the short term, but it isn’t. We have to also consider the total cost of ownership of IT infrastructure, and for enterprises, the private cloud has always been the more cost-effective alternative.

Businesses should avoid vendor lock-in contracts while they prepare for further market and business uncertainty. It is not necessary to part with large, upfront expenses for systems or pay a premium to store and access data to improve flexibility. Flexible consumption models are available to help companies weather the current storm.

Moving away from long-term IT investments can help companies gain more flexibility in their decision-making process without delaying time to market as a result. This flexibility will help customers stay prepared for ongoing uncertainty.

De-Risk IT Infrastructure

Companies looking to de-risk IT infrastructure without disrupting their cash-flow should:

• Minimize upfront investments and opt for flexible consumption models that allow for instant growth and postponed payments. Flexible consumption models should also mean the flexibility to combine CapEx and OpEx as the company’s priorities change over time.
• Choose an enterprise-class, private cloud storage infrastructure, with the agility of the public cloud and guaranteed availability. This will future-proof investments, enabling businesses to make decisions in shorter intervals and better respond to changing market conditions.

Gaining performance and reliability, without committing to any investment ahead of time, is the key to future-proofing a business and could be the difference between who succeeds and who, unfortunately, does not.