Cloud economics reinvented the computing industry by creating a new IT operational model. The cloud’s consumption-based pricing has enabled companies to quickly provision IT resources when they’re needed and pay for them based on usage, the way they buy electricity and water. The result has been substantial upfront cost savings and new levels of business agility.
Pay-as-you-go IT resources, such as compute and storage capacity, have traditionally been delivered by public cloud providers over the Internet. More recently, these services have become available using infrastructure installed in your private data center. Both traditional public cloud providers and third-party IT vendors, such as storage equipment makers, now offer on-prem usage-based cloud services.
Lower Costs Level the Competitive Playing Field
Regardless of where they’re hosted, “as-a-service” offerings slash capital expenses by precluding businesses from having to purchase IT equipment. Instead, you pay for resources as you consume them, spreading expenditures over time. Your IT team can also quickly turn up extra resources as needed—or dial them back when demand drops—and pay accordingly.
In this way, you avoid the pitfalls of best-guess capacity planning. Most common is the costly overprovisioning of equipment that sits idle much of the time. Worse, under-provisioning can degrade IT service. Using the consumption model, you can continually right-size your environment while eliminating the time it takes to purchase, configure, and test equipment before putting it into production.
This flexibility makes all companies more competitive. It also levels the playing field for smaller businesses that often lack the budgets and tech expertise of their larger counterparts.
Storage as a Service Is Ramping Up
Nearly any IT resource is now accessible with consumption pricing. Storage as a service (STaaS) is of growing interest, as the world’s data is expected to triple between 2021 and 2025. Organizations need a game plan for expanding their storage affordably to address not only sheer data growth but requirements to save more data that’s generated to fuel analytics initiatives. Data analytics depend on vast data volumes to calculate key business insights and automate operations.
The on-premises consumption option is important for IT services that need local performance or fall under regulations requiring data to be stored behind a corporate firewall. Hybrid models allow businesses to get the best of both worlds. For example, a business might wish to keep data with personally identifiable information (PII) local while extending storage of data that’s rarely used to the public cloud for archiving.
An example of an on-prem consumption-based IT service is Hitachi Vantara’s Storage as a Service (STaaS) offering. STaaS is part of the company’s EverFlex collection of solutions and component products available in an as-a-service delivery model.
The availability of consumption-based IT pricing both on-premises and off is a game changer for organizations looking to balance local IT performance and compliance with the flexibility and agility of cloud storage. It’s also an enabler for the hybrid cloud transformations under way to drive competitive advantages, business agility, efficient operations, and new ways of serving customers.
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