Pure Storage: supporting the digital transformation journey

Pure Storage helps clients drive their competitive advantage by enabling data to deliver positive business outcomes such as evidence-based decision making using real-time analytics. “Working with the British Army, as part of an ecosystem of best in class solutions suppliers, Pure is providing private cloud services on-premise but also has offerings via AWS and Azure, and at container level,” explains Colin Atkinson Pure’s UK Public Sector Account Director.

Digitalisation

“Pure Storage is supporting the digitalisation of the army as part of Programme THEIA,” reveals Colonel Mark Cornell, Assistant Head of Army Digital Services. “THEIA is how we change our ways of working to adopt more efficient digital processes. Technology is actually the easy piece of the puzzle; the challenge is cultural and behavioral change”. The army is a conservative organisation by nature, so how do we get its people - civilian, military, and contractors - to adopt the appropriate ways of working we want to deploy? 

“We move away from labour intensive processes, and move further up the value chain to get the human adding value where they should be in the decision-making process.”

Data Revolution

We’re in the midst of a data revolution highlights Atkinson. “We’re seeing an exponential growth in data analytics, which can create huge headaches for large organisations, or it can create massive opportunities. Data will be the oil that fuels this revolution….”

It’s a revolution that’s been gathering pace; each year, since 2016, 90% of the world’s data has been created in the previous two years. Atkinson also points out that 99.5% of historical data goes largely unanalyzed: “The corollary for large organisations is that if you don’t have a data strategy, you could end up with very large, very cold data silos and miss the opportunity to create that competitive advantage. By partnering with Pure we can help clients develop a data-enabling strategy.”.”

Future-Proofing

“We’re going to see a far greater use of data analytics in the British Army and across organisations in general,” forecasts Cornell. “We’re aiming for level three and level four predictive and prescriptive analytics approaches that start using Machine Learning and AI to give us deeper insights from our data. And as we move forward with Programme THEIA we see ourselves migrating our workloads and data into the cloud, making the use of the elasticity of hyperscale clouds. But also, protecting our data in the appropriate way if we wish to keep it on-prem and use it, and secure it in that way. We’re part of that cloud revolution that's going on through defense, but also across the wider public sector.”