The importance of the channel in driving modern enterprise storage
Phillip de Waal, Systems Engineering Manager at Nutanix Sub-Saharan Africa
Last year brought many challenges for IT vendors and their partner ecosystems, with rapidly shifting IT demand trends, extremely volatile macroeconomic conditions, and continued supply chain constraints. With these challenges still at the forefront, it remains crucial for vendors to listen to their partners to understand conditions on the ground and make necessary adjustments to find areas of opportunity.
For 2023, those vendors who continue to capitalise on new innovations and opportunities while working closely with their channel partners will likely be the most successful. It is, therefore, essential for vendors to align their go-to-market strategies and investments so that partners can seize the advantage and lead the way in accelerating joint successes while adapting to ongoing market dynamics. Vendors must be laser-focused on building options around profitable subscription and renewal models for their partners to find success throughout the entire customer lifecycle.
Of course, this does not necessarily mean throwing more solutions and products into the mix. Instead, it is about simplifying the portfolio and streamlining partner tools to become more customer and channel-friendly. Instead of fifty or 100 different products and price points, vendors need to consolidate. An example of this can be found in what Nutanix has done by prioritising four pillars: the development of hybrid multicloud environments, solutions focused on managing a cloud, unified storage, and database as a service. In 2023, partner enablement will be the key to success in helping businesses tackle their ever-evolving IT challenges.
Storage matters
The amount of business data being generated is growing almost exponentially every year. Advanced technologies such as data analytics, the Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence are further contributing to the massive volumes of data being generated. Vendors and their channel partners would do well to leverage the market’s need for data storage with innovative products and services.
Data storage is more critical than ever to the success of every business, regardless of the industry sector. The solutions that can help unlock the value of data and contribute to how easily and efficiently a company can organise, manage, access, share, and use this vital information have become crucial in 2023 and beyond.
While there will be a need for physical storage mediums (at least for the time being), hybrid cloud storage will continue to grow in popularity. Using different clouds for different workloads is becoming increasingly normalised. For example, some businesses might prefer to keep their most sensitive or highly regulated data in a private cloud where they have complete control over security. Less sensitive data can be stored inexpensively in the public cloud. Other hybrid scenarios mix private and public clouds with on-premises data centres for a mix-and-match model that provides the best of both worlds. Throughout all this, the channel becomes a vital enabler that facilitates hybrid cloud storage management.
Safety first
Throughout this, optimising application and user performance, managing data protection, and asserting access controls across a hybrid multi-cloud environment requires a new look at how data services are designed and deployed. Without a plan to standardise data services across locations, it can be much harder to synchronise data across multiple sites, control how data is accessed, and implement tiering for cost-effective targets.
Additionally, thoughts must turn to how shared storage has become a lucrative target for cybercriminals looking to hijack valuable customer, financial, or sensitive information and extort payment in return for access to the data. The channel will likely see an increased focus this year on enhancing ransomware defences for organisations actively looking for storage security strategies against malicious cyberattacks.
Focus on the business
Building from the security aspect, data services that allow companies to consolidate workloads using different access methods onto a single storage platform promise improved administrative productivity and compelling economics. More South African companies will turn to newer storage technologies like NVMe while expanding on their software-defined offerings to handle the performance, availability, and security requirements of mission-critical workloads.
The channel will be in a strong position to deliver solutions built around data services based on a unified storage platform. These will provide a better fit for the more dynamic, hybrid multi-cloud environments that are the future of digital infrastructure.
When workloads can be consolidated, many benefits can accrue. Data services built on unified storage systems are easier to buy and deploy. The associated infrastructure costs less, consumes less energy, and takes up less floor space than dedicated block, file, and object storage silos.
Vendors who strengthen their channel value proposition in this regard, will be well-positioned in the South African market as companies rethink how they approach their data, storage, and hybrid cloud needs this year.