Storage has not historically been a high priority in terms of overall business strategy. But with new shifts in digital business focused around extracting maximum value from data, businesses of all sizes are facing an increased need for improvements in the flexibility of their systems. As big data elevates business processes across the board, companies like IBM are working to keep up with industry trends and competitive customer needs.

“Storage is … one of the … critical foundations you have to rely on for your digital business. … If the storage goes down or is slow, your digital business and the value of that data you’re driving … just dramatically shrank,” said Eric Herzog (pictured), chief marketing officer and vice president of worldwide storage channels, IBM Storage Division, at IBM.

With its newly expanded Spectrum storage solution, the company hopes to extend the value of customer data from primary storage throughout the entire digital software development process. In a two-part interview, Herzog spoke with Peter Burris (@plburris), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California, to discuss a new storage announcement from IBM and the future of big data’s relationship to storage in digital business. (* Disclosure below.)

Watch Part 1 of the video interview with Herzog below:

Navigating a new data storage landscape

Data availability is increasingly crucial to digital business strategies beyond its utility to the end application itself, and IBM’s latest rollouts are designed to address customers’ increasing needs in data storage, Herzog explained.

“We introduced a new software-defined storage … Spectrum NAS … enhancements to our IBM cloud object storage offering … [and] several enhancements to our modern data protection suite, which is Spectrum Protect and Spectrum Protect Plus,” Herzog said.

Driven by maximizing data, a competitive digital business requires strong storage systems that can both protect information and enable accessibility for testing and implementation. With the latest additions to its Spectrum systems, IBM hopes to improve efficiency for teams across the companies they serve. “The developer wants to be able to spin things up quickly on their own. … With our stuff you can check in and check out, it integrates with all their APIs, they can quickly do their work, [and] it’s a real data set not using fake data,” Herzog said.

Testing with real data sets allows developers to truly optimize their applications based on the range of information available. “The quality of the data that those developers produce goes way up,” Herzog stated. IBM’s solution enables developer teams further by giving them self-service access, removing the roadblock of requesting permissions.

“You want those guys constantly working … and at the same time have IT focused on what they need to do. … That means … faster time to market with more reliable products for your end users,” he said.

Watch Part 2 of the video interview with Herzog below:

A key development in the Spectrum enhancements is its persistent storage capability to a container environment. Focused on customer simplicity, IBM’s software-defined storage can be used standalone or embedded in arrays. “For people who have those arrays, the container support is absolutely free. If you’ve already bought the product and you’re on our maintenance support, you just download the Spectrum Connect … [and] deploy your containers for your private cloud environment,” Herzog said.

With many customers in the midst of digital transformation transition, IBM hopes its new offering will help to provide a roadmap for protecting old workloads while investing in new ideas and systems. “You’ve got to be able to … cut costs on your traditional infrastructure and your traditional application workloads and use cases while you’re going to the next generation and modernizing,” Herzog said.

Among its core tenets of resiliency, availability and speed, cost efficiency ranks high for Spectrum and all IBM’s initiatives. “If data is the value … that doesn’t mean you want your data to be super expensive. You’ve got to figure out a way to do it cost effectively, yet still deliver the value in your digital business,” he concluded.

Be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: IBM sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither IBM nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE