For the past couple of years, no one has been able to escape the effects of supply chain problems throughout their personal and professional lives. According to our recent State of Hybrid Cloud Storage survey, storage and the IT equipment that supports storage systems were no exception, and disruptions created extra work and headaches for those teams.
Supply chain problems unequivocally hit the storage sphere
Only 1% of respondents said they felt no effect, and only 8% said the impact was minimal. For nearly half (49%), the pain was substantial.
Storage is not optional—organizations had to find a way to deal with these problems
The top action taken, cited by 67% of respondents, was spending more time on procurement and supply chain management. You can imagine the hours consumed making calls and scouring websites in search of needed gear, all taking time away from other pressing tasks on teams that are perennially overworked and understaffed. That’s a lot of lost productivity. In second place, nearly tied at 65%, is optimizing and extending the life of existing resources. No surprise here—when you can’t replace, you’re forced to work with what you’ve got. There is a limit, however, to how much you can limp along with existing resources. That’s probably why nearly half of respondents ended up incurring skyrocketing costs to get needed equipment in as quickly as possible, and almost as many had to cobble together a temporary strategy to meet immediate needs. The one thing most businesses were not willing to do is tell the business “no,” or at least “not now.”
We dug a little deeper into the numbers to see if the responses depend on the severity of the impact. In general, the bigger the impact, the more likely businesses were to take each action, with two exceptions. Those that experienced minimal impact were slightly more likely than moderates to optimize and extend the life of existing resources (63% vs. 60%). The more interesting exception is that the bigger the impact, the less likely respondents were to migrate more storage to the cloud than initially planned.
Supply chain problems are out of your control, but you can mitigate the risk with Virtana
Of all the strategies noted above, the best is to get more out of your existing storage gear so you can be less reliant on the vagaries of external market forces. Even if, like most organizations, you are already doing this, you want to optimize to the fullest possible potential. This requires deep visibility across your entire hybrid infrastructure, delivered with a strong focus on storage. From our heritage monitoring big-iron SAN infrastructures through our evolution into infrastructure performance monitoring and hybrid cloud performance, cost, and capacity management, Virtana brings unmatched storage expertise to all our Virtana Platform products, giving you the data not just to make smarter storage optimization decisions but to effectively manage your entire IT infrastructure across on-premises and cloud deployments. Try Virtana for yourself
Get the survey report: The State of Hybrid Cloud Storage
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Jon Cyr
VP of Product Management, Virtana
