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In a Gartner survey earlier this year, CIOs cited the following among their top business priorities: reducing enterprise costs; improving IT applications and infrastructure; improving efficiency; and improving business processes. Against this backdrop, many enterprise CIOs today are centralising storage and backups to their core data centres, instead of allowing remote and branch offices to maintain the hardware and data. Adding to this, organisations with offices in sometimes unstable locations may not want data stored in those offices due to security concerns and potential data breaches.

BUSINESS DRIVERS
A significant driver for many organisations interested in storage consolidation, however, is cost. Companies want to maximise their investments in SANs and realise the benefits of centralised storage. Chief among those is achieving lower IT costs by eliminating the need to purchase and maintain local storage and server hardware. A new concept, which bridges this gap, is storage delivery technology.

CIOs need to start by addressing core IT processes and transforming the data centre. As part of this movement, IT managers can expand capacity and look to extend the benefits of a consolidated approach to larger branch offices and data-intensive applications that previously were difficult or impossible to consolidate.

THE SHIFTING IT LANDSCAPE
Consolidation has the potential to empower businesses of all sizes to remove servers and data from branch offices and centralise them in the secure data centre - without sacrificing user experience. This new architectural approach makes it possible to centralise backup operations and remove data from high-risk locations, while increasing agility and lowering the costs of managing remote office IT.

With the right information, delivered at the right time and in the right place, organisations can serve customers better, make smarter decisions, and react faster to changing conditions. These elements often come together at the remote/branch office. Identifying the optimal deployment location for IT assets such as servers and supporting storage systems is one of the more challenging aspects of the IT decision process today. When the edge of the enterprise and the core at the data centre are linked together in an integrated solution, IT organisations can centralise control, security, and protection of distributed server and storage assets while ensuring timely access to (or recovery of) data and applications relied upon by users across the extended organisation.

DATA PROTECTION
In-line with growing volumes of data, enterprises should be able to decommission branch backup and recovery systems, shifting data protection operations to the data centre. Enterprises can utilise their well-honed data centre backup and recovery systems and procedures and skilled personnel to protect branch data.

Snapshots are integral to ensuring IT operations are running smoothly. In today's IT environment, administrators must be able to quickly set and assign hourly, daily, or weekly storage snapshot policies to ensure application consistent data protection in conjunction with supported data centre storage arrays.

CONCLUSION
Organisations' information bases and requirements are constantly changing in response to shifting business/customer requirements. Consolidation of systems and information at remote sites and central data centres must be seen as an ongoing, iterative process, and any system deployed, whether in the data centre or at the edge, must make this process faster and less operationally intensive now and in the future.

Key to attaining these benefits is effective implementation of solutions, including the adjustment of related processes (e.g., application deployment and backup processes). A sound implementation makes it easier for an enterprise to react to changing business conditions and new application needs in line with the fast-moving IT landscape.
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