With data becoming the active, living core of digital business, the place where it lives, leaves, and goes home to must meet new standards. Storage today is less cloudified — agile, automated, etc. — compared to other infrastructure. This can potentially drag down a company’s entire data strategy.

“We’ve just got a million snowflakes in storage,” said Matt Kixmoeller (pictured), vice president of strategy at Pure Storage Inc. From business to business, we find highly bespoke, rigid storage infrastructure, he added. Lots of dedicated silos and manual processes are at odds with cloud — not just as a place, but as the operating model for modern, data-driven business.

Kixmoeller sat down with Peter Burris (@plburris), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, for a CUBEConversation at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California. They discussed why cloud-like storage is a must for digital business both in public cloud and on-premises. (* Disclosure below.)

Watch the first video interview with Matt Kixmoeller below:

Data on demand; cloud everywhere

“Today, what we see is a lot of people build their data strategy piecemeal by project, not having the opportunity to step back and really think about it from the core,” Kixmoeller said.

A modern data strategy requires easily accessed data, along with rapid analytics, test and development. It demands a new storage type with built-in automation, one that makes all data available through on-demand self service, he added. This agile cloud storage should also offer a cloud-consumption model where users pay only for what they use.

Since most companies have hybrid environments, they need their cloud storage to extend to the on-prem data center as well. Kixmoeller illustrated this with the story of a Pure customer.

“They use Pure on-prem to host [an SAP]  application, but they leverage our Cloud Block Store offering to be able to do test/dev in the cloud. This allows them to easily spin up instances, copy production data to the cloud to be able to do test dev around it. It’s brought new levels of cloud agility to what was a traditional kind of on-prem app,” he explained.

Watch the second video interview with Matt Kixmoeller below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Pure Storage Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Pure Storage nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE