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Better access to digital information has opened new revenue opportunities in nearly every industry. Whether it involves business intelligence and analytics, mobility or internet of things, it's clear the next level of business competiveness is being built upon a foundation of data availability. None of this is news, of course. And, if you're reading this column, you are likely already heavily involved in the ongoing battle to ensure that IT resources keep pace with the increasing demands placed on business applications and data.

The good news is IT infrastructure innovation has accelerated as well. Hardware, for example, continues to become quicker and more affordable. As a result, storage systems perform faster, scale higher and hold more capacity than ever. In theory, you'd think the two, (1) growing demands served by (2) ever-more capable infrastructure, would cancel each other out. But that's not how it works in the real world. While there are a number of reasons for this inconsistency, one that doesn't get discussed enough is the time to provision new storage capacity.

When storage vendors discuss time to provision, they tend to focus on how easy it is to set up and configure an array physically located on site in a rack with adequate power and cooling. Here, setup time is often a very small portion of the entire process. The true time to provision, however, encompasses everything that occurs from once you identify a storage resource need to the moment newly acquired resources are made available to applications. The full end-to-end process can take months, and the few minutes or hours it takes to set up the final storage array is only a small part of the overall pain. Meanwhile, application demands continue to increase while the infrastructure provisioning process happens.

In this era where business competitiveness is often determined by data access, delays can negatively impact revenue opportunities and the bottom line as well.

Delays in provisioning infrastructure deployments not only slow down new IT initiatives. In this era where business competitiveness is often determined by data access, delays can negatively impact revenue opportunities and the bottom line as well. For years, you could address the time-to-provision challenge by simply deploying more storage capacity than immediately necessary, giving the environment room to support near-term growth during the sometimes lengthy process of new storage system procurement. While still considered a best practice by some, having excess infrastructure just sitting around doing nothing adds unnecessary cost, a nonstarter in this age of tighter budgets.

One obvious method for reducing the time to provision storage is using public cloud services. While this can provide near-immediate access to new capacity, performance and security, other business considerations often lead many firms to prudently retain a significant portion of data on premises. The trick here is to achieve cloud-like agility in storage provisioning while maintaining those on-premises capabilities required by many workloads. There are a number of options available to help improve, or at least mask, time-to-provision challenges for on-premises infrastructure, these include the following:

IT demands change so rapidly that new resources are often needed immediately, not months down the road. Some look to the public cloud to solve these challenges, but these services alone aren't right for everyone or every workload. In response, on-premises vendors are offering greater intelligence and more flexibility in payment options to ease the burden of deploying new capacity on site. While there are benefits to this approach, it can still be a challenge to match the agility of the public cloud. For that, hybrid clouds have stepped in as an excellent option to deliver on-premises performance and security while integrating the agility of public cloud infrastructure.

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How automation and provisioning mesh with cloud computing

Develop a private cloud environment

Read more:
Infrastructure provisioning made easier with hybrid cloud storage - TechTarget