Cloud data management and services: NetApp depressurizes your cloud

To set the stage, let’s dive into two key points. First, cloud is no longer only for nimble startups—it’s gone mainstream. Adoption hit warp speed when the pandemic left companies scrambling to adapt. Five years’ worth of digital transformation was jammed into just eight weeks in 2020. ^{1McKinsey, The COVID-19 recovery will be digital: A plan for the first 90 days, May 14, 2020}Now virtually every enterprise has applications and workloads in the cloud, whether departmental or companywide. And why not? There’s flexibility, scalability, and agility...oh my. We’ll get to the problems that cloud adoption has left in its wake shortly. That brings us to point number two. Data growth’s meteoric ascent isn’t slowing down, it’s accelerating. The total amount of data estimated to be generated by 2025 is a whopping 175 zettabytes.^{IDC, The Digitization of the World: From Edge to Core, 2018}It’s almost inconceivable how much data we’re producing and consuming daily. The collision of these two points—mainstream cloud adoption and explosive data growth—brings us to what we like to call the end of cloud’s beginning. With 55% of data estimated to be stored in the cloud by 2025^{IDC, Global DataSphere 2021-2025 Forecast, March 2021} and most companies saying they already have multicloud environments (purposefully or accidentally), the novelty is gone. We’re faced with the realities of living in the cloud. People, companies, and entire industries depend on cloud-based applications, systems, and services—all of which rely on data. Getting cloud right is no longer an option.

For a younger generation of organizations, the cloud is the de facto operating model. Others have organically grown in the cloud as they modernized or, gulp, faced migration mandates and other pressures. No matter how you got there, or which cloud (or clouds) you’re using, you’re facing some big headaches. You must continuously and intelligently manage cloud resource consumption, capacity, performance, protection, security, and costs without breaking a sweat.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the staggering complexity of multicloud environments when you have insufficient data management and storage services. There’s a ton of manual processes that weigh your team down, complicated by an already tight labor market for cloud skillsets. And don’t forget that pile of data growing in the background—without optimal data management, you’ll likely get some big cloud bills. Throw in constant security threats, evolving business needs, and pressures from other departments... it’s a lot. Deep breath—we promise it will be OK.

Yes, the cloud is a managed service. But it isn’t managing itself. If you want to thrive in the cloud while gaining (and keeping) a competitive advantage through faster innovation, it's time to take charge. Enter NetApp. Our portfolio of enterprise cloud and data management services is built on three decades of innovation to help customers put their data to work across a wide range of business-critical applications.

We’ve led the pack in expanding unified storage across hybrid and multicloud environments, allowing you to have a single set of rich data management services anywhere your data lives. Simply, our storage offerings are are best in class. We were recently named #1 in three categories: primary storage for large enterprises, enterprise scale-out file systems, and cloud file systems. ^{GigaOm, Data Storage for the Hybrid Multicloud Era, Three Radars, One Leader, January, 2022}In fact, we were the only vendor identified as a leader in all three, and that’s why our customers see NetApp as a trusted partner.

We’re the one and only company that provides unified enterprise storage across on premises and the largest public clouds through a single enterprise data management system, NetApp^® ONTAP^®. Our integrated approach delivers cloud application performance with optimized cloud storage costs, enhanced data protection, security, and compliance. We provide a single pane of glass that gives you complete visibility and actionable intelligence across your entire environment. And we offer a centralized service to manage multiple cloud providers and accounts.

In the cloud, you need to ask if your services are working hard for you or if you’re working hard for them. With cloud skillsets in high demand, you need every bit of help you can get to lift the burden of manual tasks that come with cloud management. The NetApp portfolio is fueled by AI and machine learning that give you complete control and visibility so you can get back to innovating. We offer continuous automation and optimization through services like cloud tiering for cost control, threat detection with intelligent, actionable insight, application-driven infrastructure provisioning for container-based application development, and so much more.

Recognizing early on that cloud was the future, we set out to build a comprehensive cloud data services portfolio and extended the enterprise-grade storage capabilities of ONTAP data management software to the world’s biggest clouds. That foresight paid off—it’s why Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and enterprise application providers like SAP, have all made NetApp an integral part of their storage and data services strategies. We're the only vendor that has first-party native storage and data management services in AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Our storage gives giving you the freedom to employ multicloud environments with consistency, simplicity, and flexibility.

NetApp helps you take charge of cloud environments with enterprise-grade solutions to tackle big problems that exist no matter which clouds you choose.

• Boost cloud return on investment (ROI). Stop overspending, automatically. It can be hard to manually manage cloud resource consumption to optimize costs. But you need to avoid monstrous cloud bills that result from inefficient provisioning, improper infrastructure management, and the inability to take advantage of cost-saving opportunities. NetApp delivers full visibility and intelligent automation that aligns resources with specific workload requirements for continuous optimization.

• Protect and secure data. You need to keep data safe in the remote, distributed, abstracted infrastructure of cloud environments. NetApp helps you dodge and deflect threats everywhere and safeguard against human error without it feeling like whack-a-mole. Our enterprise-grade data protection offers broad spectrum, automated, built-in security on your clouds of choice for both traditional and cloud-native applications and their data.

• Easily deliver cloud-native, stateful applications. Container-based application development gets complicated when you try to deploy at scale in constantly changing environments in multiple clouds. Mission-critical cloud-native apps need powerful data protection and persistent storage. NetApp delivers application-aware data management for stateful applications, consistent, pervasive storage automation, and powerful backup, data protection, and disaster recovery capabilities.

• Eliminate cloud infrastructure management complexity. With more cloud providers comes more proprietary features, nuances, and the need for effective and consistent management across clouds. NetApp simplifies infrastructure management so you can quickly and easily provision storage with complete visibility into your environment. Build automation to meet the speed and scale your infrastructure demands to reduce the burden on cloud management teams and rapidly respond to dynamic demands for highly reliable resources.