Welcome to the November eNewsletter from Storage magazine,which includes a fascinating opinion piece from Infinidat's Richard Bradbury that suggests that the main drivers for enterprise storage decisions have changed significantly over the course of the last year or so.

While in the past CIO and CTO buyer conversations were mostly focused on cost efficiency and performance, Bradbury argues, the two biggest priorities now are cybersecurity and product delivery time.

"Customers are waking up to two new realities - enterprise storage needs to be a critical component of an enterprise's corporate cybersecurity strategy, and product delivery lead times vary significantly between vendors," says the article. "One may deliver products ordered in weeks, while another vendor will take many months just to deliver complementary products for an end-to-end solution."

While most of us will recognise the exponential shift in focus toward security, the argument around lead times is perhaps not so immediately obvious. As increased consolidation leads to more capacity and availability, decision making is happening faster all the time. Noone wants to have to explain to their CEO why their data infrastructure can't scale, or the next phase of a digital transformation can't be delivered on time.

We'd be interested to hear the views of our readers on this - is product delivery time as big an issue as cyber-security? Feel free to email me at the address below.

David Tyler, Editor
Storage magazine

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