Busting myths and taking names, part 4: Does modernizing IT mean breaking the bank?

In this blog series, we’re busting open four pervasive myths about enterprise applications.
Today we take on Myth #4: Modernizing IT means breaking the bank.

Modernization, by definition, is never “one and done.” You might modernize once, but time marches on. And what was once modern quickly becomes legacy (if you’re lucky) or obsolete (if you’re not).

Whether they’re running on SAP HANA, Oracle, or SQL, your enterprise applications are the engines that keep your business running. The makers of these apps are continuously pushing improvements, with each upgrade delivering more horsepower to drive better business outcomes. But without a modern IT infrastructure to support them, you could find yourself stalled out, watching your competition pass you by.

It’s easy to understand how this myth came about. In fact, for many years, this was reality. For decades, technology refreshes required significant overprovisioning of resources and massive capital outlays for on-premises physical hardware. But in today’s world of cloud consumption models, this is no longer the case.

Opex and consumption-based models are increasingly popular as IT departments struggle to meet growing demands with shrinking resources. Pay-as-you-go models (“as-a-service”) better align costs with usage, are inherently more flexible and scalable, and help you avoid overbuying and overprovisioning.

And these days you don’t have to move to the public cloud to take advantage of consumption-based pricing. NetApp has opex options in the public cloud and on site. We simplify data management across on-premises and multicloud locations to give you greater cost control and maximum operational flexibility. We call this ability a data fabric.

Traditional storage vendors are just now coming around to acknowledging the importance of a hybrid, multicloud data fabric. Fortunately for our customers, we’ve been pioneering the data fabric since 2014.

We started this journey nearly 10 years ago with the data fabric. Today we have a broad portfolio of solutions that reduce complexity, automate, and optimize so you can flex and choose what’s right for your business to better meet customer demand.

We know that not every organization wants to move their enterprise applications to the cloud. You might be one of the 65% of enterprises keeping their SAP HANA workloads on premises.

For those instances, NetApp^® solutions can help you bring cloud economics on premises and into the data center. Only NetApp enables you to unify all your workloads—whether they’re on premises or in the cloud—under a single management experience and a single monthly subscription payment.

NetApp also has the cloud expertise to help you decide which workloads you can safely move to the cloud and which ones need to stay on premises. Want to keep your SAP HANA application on premises but do backup and disaster recovery in the cloud? No problem. With a data fabric built on NetApp, you can seamlessly move data back and forth between cloud and on-premises resources.

A large consumer credit reporting agency is transforming IT with a cloud-first strategy. They have 5,500 applications and over 40PB of data that they eventually want to move to the public cloud. But they know that isn’t going to happen overnight—it could take 3 to 5 years to safely migrate all their applications and data to the cloud.

Through our cloud design workshops, we worked with this customer to identify the workloads that are ready for the cloud and those they want to keep on premises. Cloud Volumes ONTAP^® for Google Cloud has made it easy for the organization to seamlessly migrate workloads from their premises and into the cloud while retaining all the enterprise-grade storage features they expect from NetApp.

NetApp Keystone™ enabled the company to decommission their data centers and move to an opex model for several important workloads while retaining the flexibility to move them to the cloud in the future. These workloads include a back-office application running on a massive Oracle database, their entire VDI environment of more than 1,000 seats, and their mission-critical income and employment verification application.

Does modernizing IT have to break the bank? Consider that myth busted. Check out this infographic to see what other myths you can bust by partnering with NetApp to build your hybrid cloud.