With the unprecedented impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the global economy, the watchword for companies is “reduce costs,” which also applies to spending on technology.

Showing enterprises how they can increase storage efficiency and lower costs has been one of the strategies of IT consulting company Advanced Technology Services Group.

“Customers are looking to save money because they don’t know what their financial outlook is [because of] COVID-19,” said Tim Conley (pictured), principal of ATS, which is an IBM partner. “[We] talk to them about how they can drive their storage efficiencies up with IBM technologies, especially virtualization, and then reducing their overall cost. That’s key, especially now.”

Conley spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during a digital CUBE Conversation. They discussed how COVID-19 is impacting ATS clients’ multicloud strategies, as well as details of the ATS and IBM partnership . (* Disclosure below.)

Bringing savings to the cloud

IBM’s Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud helps streamline storage in the cloud, resulting in financial savings, according to Conley. The solution enables data on heterogeneous storage systems to be replicated or migrated between on-premises and IBM Cloud or Amazon Web Services. Now, IBM is working to extend the solution to Microsoft Azure, Conley added.

“Tying [different clouds] together is the direction people are looking to go,” he pointed out. “Some of them are there and have done it, but I would say some, or more of them, are in the infancy stage of that.”

A challenge when moving workloads to the cloud is meeting compliance and cyber resilience requirements. The hardest part of this is sorting the data out to decide how and where to store it, Conley explained.

“Trying to classify the data, they just don’t know; they might know the applications, but they don’t know the content of that data,” he explained. “The technology, groups within the customers, the storage folks, the [operating systems] folks, the application folks — they’re all about the cloud. But at the end of the day, it’s the security folks that need to be able to do that data classification to see, can the data even go there?”

Despite constantly evolving technological advances, what worries customers the most is data security, according to Conley.

“One of our jobs is to really help our customers understand where their gaps are within their organization so that if they do get hit by cybercrime, or ransomware, they can actually survive that and not actually have to pay for it. Then be up and running in a very small amount of time, which is key,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations.

Photo: SiliconANGLE