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Perspectives


THE IMPORTANCE OF AN AGILE DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE

Now is the time for organizations to throw traditional ideas about IT
infrastructure out the window and start looking at technology as an agility
enabler

 * Cybersecurity
 * Pure Perspectives
 * Ransomware



Andy Stone

Andy Stone is an accomplished IT executive with a passion for technology and
creating innovative solutions that...

View Full Bio


5 min Read

Sep 21, 2021

18

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 * Cybersecurity
 * Pure Perspectives
 * Ransomware

If the events of the past 18+ months have taught us anything, it’s that modern
businesses—and their CIOs and other IT leaders—can’t afford not to think and act
with agility.

They must be able to make both proactive and reactive decisions so that,
ideally, the first type of decision-making makes the second more successful. And
they must be confident they have the right IT infrastructure and technology
partners in place to help them field whatever curveballs—from natural disasters
to ransomware attacks—get thrown their way.

When agility helps make your business more resilient from an IT perspective,
what does it look like? A session at our Pure//Accelerate® Digital conference
explored this exact topic: “The Agility Imperative: Developing a Digital
Infrastructure That’s Ready for Anything.” Two inspirational IT leaders, Kim
LaGrue, CIO for the City of New Orleans, and Adam Rasner, vice president of
technology operations for auto retailer AutoNation, explained how proactive IT
decision-making has been instrumental in helping their organizations navigate
unique circumstances that have demanded fast reactions.

Here’s just some of what they shared with us:*


AGILITY VS. RANSOMWARE

Only a few weeks after the collapse of the Hard Rock Hotel construction project
in October 2019, the City of New Orleans faced another crisis: a major
ransomware attack.

At the first sign of malicious activity, LaGrue said her team moved fast to shut
down hundreds of critical devices and systems and disconnect the city’s network
from the internet. And they did so under the added pressure of meeting the
mayor’s edict that “the work of the city would not stop.”

LaGrue said the work of the City of New Orleans didn’t stop, but making that
happen required the IT team to be “very agile” about the work that they were
doing behind the scenes. She explained, “We had to reimagine how we’d keep
working and decide whether we would rebuild and move forward. We also had to be
very transparent and very communicative about this incident with the public.”

In response to the ransomware attack, which thankfully didn’t get as far as
encryption or ransom demands, LaGrue and her team made a proactive decision to
update the city’s underperforming, legacy storage platform and migrate to Pure
Storage®. This move, they believed, could help the City of New Orleans be even
more agile when reacting to future crises. (They didn’t have to wait long to
prove that theory as the COVID-19 pandemic would emerge in early 2020.)

For a closer look at how Pure Storage helped the City of New Orleans get back
online after a ransomware attack, watch this on-demand session from
Pure//Accelerate Digital.


AGILITY VS. PANDEMIC DISRUPTION

Back in 2019, long before anyone had heard of COVID-19, AutoNation’s leadership
set a course for a major digital transformation journey designed to modernize
the car-buying experience for customers from end to end. Rasner said, “We’ve
been working to make things more ‘Amazon-like,’ with the idea that if you don’t
want to visit a showroom, you don’t have to. And we’d been progressing nice and
slow along that path until the pandemic came along. Basically, that poured a lot
of fuel on the fire.”

Forced to close its physical locations, except for its service centers,
AutoNation needed to accelerate its digital transformation rapidly. The work the
IT team had planned to achieve in about five months had to be compressed into
just three months. “It was all hands on deck,” Rasner said.

Pure Storage is the foundation for AutoNation’s highly scalable IT
infrastructure that supports its new and evolving digital experiences. “IT
infrastructure that can scale, reliable cost modeling, and ease-of-use
implementation all became really, really critical in this new world where the
pandemic drastically changed priorities,” said Rasner. “It allowed us to meet
the needs of the development teams working around the clock to build our new
applications.”

The IT team’s success in helping AutoNation speed its digital transformation led
to some impressive bottom-line results, according to Rasner. “In the first few
months of the pandemic, we had some serious challenges—sales were down 60-70%.
But then, we went into three or four record quarters in a row, which were
historic records for the company,” he said. “I can’t say all of that was
attributable to the new digital experience, but quite a bit of it was. Our CEO
even mentioned it in several earnings releases, and I hadn’t seen that before.”


AGILITY VS. WHATEVER COMES NEXT

LaGrue and Rasner both said that the disruption of the pandemic has likely
forever changed how their organizations—and their IT teams—operate. And the need
to stay agile? It’s more critical than ever.

“We were always thinking about our one-year strategy, two-year strategy,
lifecycling equipment, and so on,” said Rasner. “But now, we’re thinking much
further out—about scenarios that we may never have thought about before. We’re
also thinking much more deeply about what we may need to prepare for. I
challenge my team to think about what could happen and how we would address it.”

LaGrue said now is the time for organizations to “throw all traditional thoughts
about IT infrastructure out the window.” She explained: “The constructs we’ve
looked at over years and years have to go away…As long as we look at technology
as the enabler that it is and understand our business and the goals we’re
working toward, then we’ll be ready to respond and remain creative about using
technology to achieve those goals.”


SEE MORE HIGHLIGHTS FROM PURE//ACCELERATE DIGITAL

If you’d like to view other sessions from our recent conference that you may
have missed or want to revisit, explore our on-demand sessions. You can access
even more insight into how Pure Storage can help your business become more
agile—and resilient.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Note: Quotes have been edited for readability and conciseness.


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