As discussed in our prior installment, while there is no “one-size fits all” path to cloud infrastructure adoption, a roadmap can ease and simplify the transition to cloud while minimizing IT disruption. More importantly, a phased approach (as shown in the figure below) enables organizations to take advantage of on-demand infrastructure sooner than later, leveraging scalability, cost advantages and rapid deployment capabilities of cloud.
Data storage expansion may be one of the easiest ways to leverage cloud infrastructure, which is why we list it as phase 1 of our roadmap. Besides the simple integration path, storage is a foundational building block of a cloud-based IT strategy – once data is in the cloud, more cloud services can be rolled in. Need another reason to begin with storage? Storage is growing rapidly, with the digital universe set to exceed 40,000 exabytes (40 billion terabytes) by 2020. With a data explosion looming, nearly every organization needs to formulate a plan for dealing with storage capacity sprawl.