We regularly get asked by service providers and IT leaders how they can reduce their IT spend. We are all being asked to do more with less and efficient storage management is crucial for businesses seeking to reduce IT spend and enhance operational agility.
Traditional storage infrastructure often entails high upfront capital costs, inflexible financing, and ongoing support license fees that contribute to significant lifetime asset costs.
For this reason, since 2011 Zadara has offered another way as the pioneer in Storage as a Service (STaaS) enabling our customers to optimize asset management, streamline budgeting, and leverage cloud-like benefits. STaaS benefits are as real today as they were then, so it’s no surprise it’s continuing to gain traction. Gartner predicts, by 2028, consumption-based STaaS will replace over 35% of enterprise storage capex, up from less than 10% in 2023.
So what should you expect in a purpose-built STaaS solution to reduce your IT spend and embrace a modern cloud-like operating model?
Lower Financial Commitments: Save money while still getting top-notch storage solutions.
STaaS eliminates upfront capital costs, enabling organizations to pay for storage resources on a consumption-based model. This approach reduces wasted resources and optimizes asset utilization, ultimately lowering overall storage costs. More than 70% of storage lifetime asset costs are attributed to utilization inefficiencies, inflexible capex financing, and support license fees, Gartner reports. Zadara takes this a step further, requiring the minimum financial spend and commitments. Its financial commitments required from the customer are 30-50% lower than other STaaS providers.
Highly Flexibility: Traditional storage infrastructure often constrains IT operations’ agility and responsiveness due to inflexible capex and budgeting processes. STaaS, on the other hand, provides a flexible and scalable on-premises cloud operating model. With STaaS, organizations can respond swiftly to changing business demands, allocate resources efficiently, and eliminate the delays associated with traditional infrastructure procurement. Zadara customers can swing between various storage types and/or compute over time as the customer chooses. This high level of flexibility results in a substantial elimination of customer financial risk.
Hybrid Strategy: STaaS is an integral part of the hybrid platform strategy, which replaces traditional capex licensing, budgeting, and sourcing models. Benefit by combining on-premises, colocation, public cloud, and edge infrastructure services into a centrally-managed IT operating environment. Gartner projects that hybrid-based STaaS will grow to over 20% of total enterprise storage shipments by 2026. With over 500 global cloud locations, Zadara’s purpose-built STaaS aligns seamlessly with the hybrid strategy, enabling organizations to future-proof their storage infrastructure while reducing costs. Unlike hyperscalers, Zadara does not charge data egress fees, giving customers the freedom to move their data around without incurring extra costs.
On-Demand and Fully Managed: STaaS provides cloud-like benefits without the incremental risks and costs associated with fully transitioning to the public cloud. By adopting an on-premises cloud-as-a-service-like platform, businesses can enjoy elastic scalability, flexibility, and enhanced SLAs for mission-critical applications. Zadara provides a fully managed service that includes hardware, software, operations and support, not just cold, unconfigured hardware. For customers, this means faster time to solution and reduction of risk from non-optimized solutions.
With STaaS Service Providers are responding quickly to evolving business needs. STaaS is not just a cost-saving measure but a strategic move towards modernizing storage infrastructure and future-proofing IT operations.
And Zadara’s fully-managed STaaS and on-demand compute is already available in over 500 cloud locations globally, making it even easier to cut your IT spend.
To learn more about how you can How Can I Use Storage as a Service to Reduce IT Spend?, checkout the report from Gartner.
To learn more about performance dependent STaaS, check out our blog, “When Performance Consistency Matters, Not all Storage-as-a-Service Solutions are Equal.”
