TECHNOLOGY SPOTLIGHT

Sponsored by: Pure Storage

This Technology Spotlight examines how Pure Storage can assist IT organizations with
hybrid cloud storage models that can be consumed as a service, reducing risk and
complexity for the business and IT.

Digital Infrastructure Resiliency Drives Interest

in New As-a-Service Cloud Operating Models
April 2022

Written by: Susan Middleton, Research Vice President, Flexible Consumption and Financing Strategies for IT
Infrastructure; and Rob Brothers, Program Vice President, Datacenter and Support Services

Introduction AT A GLANCE
IDC's research demonstrates that enterprise organizations are prioritizing
digital infrastructure resiliency as a foundational element of their IT KEY STATS
strategy. These organizations are looking for richer levels of visibility, cross- Recent IDC research reveals a potential
platform control, advanced data management, and protection that spans surge in as-a-service offers; in fact, 73% of
enterprises intend to use them by the end
the entire edge to core continuum, and cloud-based as-a-service (XaaS) of 2022.
models are a great way to achieve those insights. IDC predicts by 2024,
over 75% of infrastructure in edge locations will be consumed and/or WHAT'S IMPORTANT
operated via an as-a-service model, as will more than half of datacenter IT staff can now focus on driving business
infrastructure. Pure Storage is continuing to shift its strategy to address this innovation rather than day-to-day hybrid
storage administrative duties.
new environment and bring solutions to market that match customers'
evolving demands. At a high level, Pure Storage offers customers an elastic
infrastructure that resides within a secure on/off-premises environment and provides insights into public and private
cloud workloads. Businesses are attracted to cloud service providers because of the pay-per-use model, the rapid
provisioning and scalability of capacity, and the reduced life-cycle management of infrastructure. IDC observes that the
adoption of as-a-service shifts customers to a cloud operating model that can fuel digital transformation.

Situation Overview
The emerging digital infrastructure ecosystem will increasingly be built on a cloud foundation that focuses on ensuring
ever-faster delivery of an innovative, frictionless infrastructure including hardware, software, resource abstraction,
automation, AI/ML, and consistent ubiquitous, scalable operations across all clouds whether it resides in your datacenter,
colocation facility, service provider, or edge location. As cloud adoption accelerates, organizations are grappling with the
complexity of managing all these new ecosystems that span multiple platforms and locations. The increased use of AI/ML
ensures IT organizations will identify and align with those critical key performance indicators (KPIs) that will impact
business outcomes. Deep proactive and predictive analytics across infrastructure cost, health, compliance, and
performance will make it easier to detect trends and automate responses that increase resiliency and flexibility.
SPOTLIGHT Digital Infrastructure Resiliency Drives Interest in New As-a-Service Cloud Operating Models

As a service and as-a-service models are financial packages that enable the cloud experience. They can be located on or
off premises, are hybrid in nature, and help manage complex cloud storage. These solutions allow companies to focus on
business initiatives rather than day-to-day operations by transferring the risk of operating and owning the assets to the
asset provider. IDC notes an increasing demand in the as-a-service segments of cloud spending. Combining shared cloud
as-a-service and dedicated cloud as-a-service growth, these two markets will account for most of all cloud spending
throughout the forecast period, growing from 55.7% in 2021 to 64.1% in 2025. These segments will also see the fastest
growth in spending, with a five-year CAGR of 21.3%.
In October 2021, IDC surveyed 829 respondents worldwide to understand the top drivers for infrastructure investment.
Figure 1 illustrates the demand for these solutions with 73% of those surveyed saying they strongly agree or agree with
the statement that they will adopt a more flexible "pay as you go" infrastructure. What drives customers to these
solutions has changed in recent years — previously, it was to move toward an opex way of spending, but today, it's about
getting a cloud experience both off and on premises and getting access to state-of-the-art hardware, software, and
services at a lower initial cost. One of the current misnomers in the industry is that cloud is not an on-premises solution —
companies think of cloud as a location, when it is an operating model that can exist virtually anywhere.

FIGURE 1: Plans to Use Flexible Pay-as-You-Go Opex Consumption Purchasing

Q Please rate your level of agreement with the statement: We plan to use flexible, pay-as-you-go
opex consumption–driven models for the majority of our digital infrastructure and cloud
purchasing by the end of 2022.

Strongly agree
73% agree
Somewhat agree

Neither agree nor disagree

Somewhat disagree

Strongly disagree

0 10 20 30 40 50 60
% of respondents

n = 829
Note: Data represents the weighted responses by region for those respondents that ranked their response as a 4 or 5 (agree/strongly agree).
Source: IDC's Future Enterprise Resiliency and Spending Survey, Wave 10, October 2021

#US49011822 Page 2
SPOTLIGHT Digital Infrastructure Resiliency Drives Interest in New As-a-Service Cloud Operating Models

As-a-Service Drivers and Attributes

Reducing risk within the enterprise storage environment is key — this risk is not only in the ownership of the asset but
the day-to-day administration of that asset to make sure the company extracts the maximum value and experience out
of that investment. Additional IDC surveys reveal other drivers and attributes that organizations consider when adopting
these models.
Those drivers and attributes are:

» Working with a trusted partner that understands their environments and business goals
» Cloud functionality on premises as well as off premises
» Adopting the latest technology (and staying with it) at a predictable cost, with a lower cost to entry
» Helping reduce the complexity of managing infrastructure and enable IT to focus on driving business outcomes
» Reducing IT staff workloads on day-to-day support of infrastructure
» Providing intelligence that accelerates decision making and responsiveness
» Streamlining the time to spin up new capacity and reduce the procurement cycles
Risk and risk mitigation are an important aspect to these solutions, and we recommend that organizations ask
themselves the following questions:

» Should we keep employees trained on the latest storage software and features, or do we rely on the vendor or
partner to make sure that we are using all aspects of the asset to support these solutions? Should we risk using our
own resources to support these solutions, or do we rely upon the vendor who knows the product the best?

» Should we continue to struggle with overprovisioning or underprovisioning for bursty or unpredictable workloads?
Or rely on a vendor or partner with predictive analytics tools to help with capacity requirements?

» Is the system properly secured with the latest patches? Do we leave that to our resources (team), or do we trust
the vendor to make sure we are compliant and secure?
More often, customers are pushing that risk burden back to the vendor. Figure 2 shows the advantages these offers bring
to the enterprise and IT organization.

#US49011822 Page 3
SPOTLIGHT Digital Infrastructure Resiliency Drives Interest in New As-a-Service Cloud Operating Models

FIGURE 2: Why Use Consumption-Based Models

Q What is the main reason(s) your organization decided to use or is contemplating using
consumption-based infrastructure?

Ability to adopt new technology and

upgrades (server accelerators, GPUs, etc.) at New tech at a lower
a lower barrier to entry
cost to entry
Keeping up on the latest technology dominates the
Wanted a cloud-like experience (automated
rationale for these
and self-provisioning [i.e., AWS]) solutions, followed
Wanted our environment kept optimized by a cloud-like
and functioning at a higher level
experience. Think
Looking for the vendor to take more risk in about solutions that
managing our IT environment
need to be
Wanted to move to an opex model for cash
flow reasons
refreshed more
Needed an edge-based solution (improve often.
the cost-based economics/ongoing cost of
an edge solution)
Wanted to move to an opex model due to
changes in FASB laws

0 10 20 30 40 50
% of respondents

Source: IDC's Consumption-Based Infrastructure Market Trends Survey, September 2020

These as-a-service models work for a myriad of different solutions and workloads. When asked what technology
solutions they would use in as-a-service models, 47% of the respondents selected primary storage (with secondary
storage solutions at 41%). The top workloads are data analytics (especially at the edge) and data management. To
increase growth and adoption, it will be important to focus on how to manage these multiple cloud solutions to get the
most value and reliability.
Global conditions are driving a huge acceleration in digital transformation. Whatever form your digital road map is taking,
Evergreen//One can provide a robust solution for your data with the experience and economics of the public cloud and
the security and resilience of an on-premises solution.

#US49011822 Page 4
SPOTLIGHT Digital Infrastructure Resiliency Drives Interest in New As-a-Service Cloud Operating Models

Beyond the workloads and adoption advantages, most organizations that adopt as-a-service models also recognize the
business benefits. IDC surveys demonstrate that the top business-related benefits of as-a-service models influencing IT
decision makers are:

» Improved system optimization and application performance

» Better IT agility that enables faster development and deployment of workloads at scale
» Ability to scale to meet business demand (The COVID-19 pandemic taught us that organizations have to be able to
pivot quickly. The better optimized their environment, the faster they could react.)

Pure Storage Abilities

Evergreen//One is a flexible storage subscription service, unifying and accelerating data management across on premises
and the public cloud. Customers can consume foundational block, file, and object storage services underpinned by
proprietary Pure technology. There is no hardware to purchase or large commitment of storage capacity required up
front. Customers can reserve as little as 50TiB of storage capacity at a discounted rate, with access to unlimited on-
demand as a service thereafter.
The offer can be extended beyond on-premises to the public cloud with Cloud Block Store, where customers can
consume storage directly from the public cloud within the Azure and AWS Marketplaces. So users can have one
subscription across on premises, colocation/managed services, and/or the public cloud, enabling an uncomplicated
unified experience across all deployments that matter to customers. The offer has the following benefits:

» Subscribing to a service reduces operational risk. Pure is providing a service underpinned by SLAs and is taking on
the responsibility to manage and evolve the deployed solution. This not only mitigates risk but it frees up internal
resources to work on more strategic projects.
» Evergreen//One is flexible, is agile, and helps customers to alleviate the risk associated with overprovisioning and
underprovisioning.

» With its Evergreen extensible architecture, Evergreen//One helps eliminate disruptive upgrades and maintenance
and continuously keeps customer environments current to meet their SLAs.

» The Evergreen//One catalog highlights service tiers designed to align with enterprise workload requirements and
simplify subscription management by allowing customers to select the specific tiers required for their applications
rather than simply choosing block, file, or object services. This model provides a level of flexibility similar to
hyperscaler models.
One of the goals for Evergreen//One is to provide a cloud experience similar to what hyperscalers provide. But a major
advantage that Pure has over the cloud providers is Pure1. Hyperscalers don't have the equivalent of Pure1. They can
monitor, but they can't predict. And they don't have the proactive capability that Pure1 brings. Pure1 powered by Meta is
an AI-driven platform for predictive service management. From one place, customers can monitor and manage all their
data service platforms (e.g., on-premises [FlashArray] or in hybrid cloud environments [Cloud Block Store]).

#US49011822 Page 5
SPOTLIGHT Digital Infrastructure Resiliency Drives Interest in New As-a-Service Cloud Operating Models

Conclusion
The success of as-a-service models is derived by the depth of services vendors provide to create a cloud-like experience.
Within these solutions, the vendor is responsible for maintaining and supporting the assets. This includes life-cycle
services like assessing, planning, designing, implementing, supporting, managing, and proper disposition and
replacement of the assets. Within those life-cycle services, the vendor must create an experience for the customer that
matches or, better yet, is superior to the public cloud. Reducing IT staff workload on routine tasks (such as patching,
monitoring, and troubleshooting) is a key benefit for IT, and this enables the IT staff to focus on creating business value
and improved outcomes.
As organizations continue to look for ways to improve productivity, as-a-service models represent a way for IT teams to
support new workloads and business requirements with confidence. This enables business resiliency and agility efforts all
within budget requirements. These are the reasons that IDC predicts that by 2025, 60% of enterprises will fund LOB and
IT projects through opex budgets, matching how vendors provide their services with a focus on outcomes that are
determined by SLAs and KPIs. The adoption of as-a-service models like Evergreen//One enables organizations to focus on
outcomes instead of infrastructure.

About the Analysts

Susan Middleton, Research Vice President, Flexible Consumption and Financing
Strategies for IT Infrastructure
Susan Middleton leads IDC's worldwide research on IT equipment, software, and services financing markets.
As Research VP for IDC's Flexible As-a-service and Financing Strategies for IT Infrastructure research, her
analysis provides insight from both a supply-side and a buyers' point of view. Ms. Middleton's core research
coverage includes the evolution of procurement models from purchasing, leasing, and financing to the new
as-a-service models, also known as flexible as-a-service. Based on her analysis and expertise on procurement
strategies and IT equipment life cycles, Ms. Middleton's research helps vendors and buyers understand the
top drivers of the new flexible as-a-service models and the impact of these new buying behaviors on long-
term IT equipment values and forecasts.

Rob Brothers, Program Vice President, Datacenter and Support Services

Rob Brothers is a Program Vice President for IDC's Datacenter and Support Services program, as
well as a regular contributor to the Infrastructure Services and Financial Strategies Programs. He
focuses on worldwide support and deployment services for hardware and software and provides
expert insight and intelligence on how enterprises should be addressing key areas for datacenter
transformation and edge deployment and management strategies. IT hardware services covered
include IoT devices, converged infrastructures, storage, servers, client devices, networking
equipment, and peripherals.

#US49011822 Page 6
SPOTLIGHT Digital Infrastructure Resiliency Drives Interest in New As-a-Service Cloud Operating Models

MESSAGE FROM THE SPONSOR

About Pure
Pure is redefining the storage experience and empowering innovators by simplifying how people consume and
interact with data. Pure remains focused on customers, delivering products that drive success along with procurement
models that meet the needs of businesses. Across a customer base that exceeds 10,000 globally, Pure maintains a Net
Promoter Score of 85 – in the top 1% of all B2B companies.
Please visit www.purestorage.com/evergreen-one to find out how Evergreen//One can provide the operational and
financial flexibility required to mitigate business risk and deliver enterprise-grade storage services via a single
subscription.

The content in this paper was adapted from existing IDC research published on www.idc.com.

IDC Research, Inc. This publication was produced by IDC Custom Solutions. The opinion, analysis, and research results presented herein are drawn from
140 Kendrick Street more detailed research and analysis independently conducted and published by IDC, unless specific vendor sponsorship is noted. IDC
Custom Solutions makes IDC content available in a wide range of formats for distribution by various companies. A license to distribute
Building B IDC content does not imply endorsement of or opinion about the licensee.
Needham, MA 02494, USA External Publication of IDC Information and Data — Any IDC information that is to be used in advertising, press releases, or promotional
T 508.872.8200 materials requires prior written approval from the appropriate IDC Vice President or Country Manager. A draft of the proposed
F 508.935.4015 document should accompany any such request. IDC reserves the right to deny approval of external usage for any reason.
Twitter @IDC Copyright 2022 IDC. Reproduction without written permission is completely forbidden.
idc-insights-community.com
www.idc.com

#US49011822 Page 7