NetApp today announced the results of its first industry research on Flash adoption in EMEA. In a survey of 3,000 IT decision makers, 90 percent of respondents acknowledged there is a need for Flash within their businesses. However, despite this need, cost and the lack of understanding of the benefits of Flash in financial decision makers remain major barriers to widespread adoption in the region.

Key findings in the survey include despite the cost of Flash technology decreasing, 40 percent of IT decision makers think it is too expensive to invest in. The apparent cost barrier is most prevalent amongst smaller businesses.

90 percent of respondents admitted there was a need for Flash within their businesses. IT decision makers from medium sized businesses are the strongest advocates of Flash, with 94 percent agreeing that ‘a lack of need for Flash solutions’ is not a barrier to Flash adoption.

IT decision makers revealed that one in five financial decision makers (22 percent) within enterprises do not have sufficient understanding of the benefits of Flash technology to make an investment. This barrier is most pronounced among larger enterprises, with almost one quarter of respondents stating financial decision makers do not know enough about Flash technology..

“For many businesses looking to digitally transform, the idea of an All-Flash data center has become a practical reality,” said Fadi Kanafani, Regional Director Middle East & Africa. “However, despite the introduction of new high capacity drives and downward pricing trends of Flash technologies, our research shows that there is still work to be done to educate business leaders on the true value of Flash. We are working to remove the barriers and risk to Flash adoption, so customers can realise the promise of an All-Flash data center, simply and cost-effectively.”

“The true benefit of Flash storage is less power, less cooling, less space and less moving parts in combination with higher performance,” explains Peter Wüst, NetApp Senior Director Emerging Solutions & Innovation Group EMEA. “Flash, together with NetApp software to manage data more efficiently between clouds in a scale-out fashion, enables the digital transformation.”

NetApp delivers one of the industry’s broadest portfolio of All-Flash arrays, providing customers with the scale, speed and data services required for the next-generation data center. The NetApp Flash portfolio helps customers achieve the best outcomes across priority deployment models including performance applications, virtualised infrastructure and cloud-like infrastructure.