Resilience Across Hybrid Cloud Environments
Resiliency has become a critical concept for modern digital businesses that seek to maintain continuity and thrive in the face of disruptions and challenges. While often equated with redundancy, true resiliency encompasses a broader spectrum of capabilities. Beyond the essential backup systems and mirrored components, it integrates flexibility, adaptability, scalability, and agility. These elements collectively empower organizations to navigate challenges, seize opportunities, and thrive in an ever-evolving digital landscape.
Defining Cyber Resiliency
According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), cyber resilience is defined as “the ability to anticipate, withstand, recover from, and adapt to adverse conditions, stresses, attacks, or compromises on systems that use or are enabled by cyber resources.” This concept has become increasingly critical as today’s digitally transformed enterprises heavily rely on their digital operations and cannot afford interruptions to these vital systems. In today’s business world, system failure is not an option.
The shift towards cyber resilience reflects a broader change in cybersecurity philosophy. Industry leaders have recognized that preventing every malicious attack is unrealistic in today’s complex threat landscape. Instead, businesses must adopt a resilience mindset, acknowledging that some intrusions will inevitably occur. The focus has expanded from pure prevention to include the ability to anticipate, withstand, and rapidly recover from such incidents.
This new approach emphasizes maintaining core functions during an attack and swiftly restoring normal operations afterwards. It ensures business continuity by preventing organizations from being at the mercy of a single failed system or component. Cyber resilience enables businesses to withstand multiple types of disruptions and continue operating effectively, even in the face of adverse cyber events. This holistic strategy is essential for any modern business navigating the increasingly complex and threatening digital landscape.
The Resilient Journey of NetApp
A resilient business does not just restore what has been impacted; it evolves to meet challenges head-on. Modern digital businesses need to think beyond traditional disaster recovery and build flexibility into every aspect of their operations. But how do you integrate resiliency into your enterprise? For NetApp customers, it has been a natural progression. They have been along for the journey as NetApp has transformed beyond its storage roots as they now offer object storage capabilities and automated data services that enable businesses to evolve their IT infrastructure and readily adapt to new and emerging technologies and changing demands.
Comprehensive Resiliency
Resiliency isn’t achieved through one or two isolated measures. Instead, it’s the result of multiple, interconnected resiliency factors working in harmony. NetApp’s approach to cyber resiliency exemplifies this comprehensive strategy, incorporating features such as:
- Immutable snapshots and end-to-end data encryption
- Seamless integration between cloud and on-premises environments
- Zero-trust data access controls and multifactor authentication
- Rapid data restoration and automated failover mechanisms
These capabilities form what could be described as a multi-layered defense strategy designed to enhance an organization’s ability to anticipate, withstand, and quickly recover from cyber incidents. By adopting such a comprehensive approach, NetApp empowers its customers to maintain operational continuity and protect data integrity, even against sophisticated and evolving cyber threats. Now let’s take a closer look at the core features of NetApp’s architecture that contribute to its exceptional resilience.
Unified Storage Architecture
One of the ways that NetApp separates itself in the storage market is by offering a comprehensive solution that natively combines both Network-Attached Storage (NAS) and block storage capabilities. This compound integration offers real benefits.
- Simplified Management: Administrators can manage both NAS and block storage through a single interface, reducing complexity and operational overhead.
- Flexibility: Organizations can easily adapt to changing storage needs without having to invest in separate systems for different storage types. This allows companies to run mixed workloads such as file-sharing applications alongside database-driven applications on the same platform.
- Cost-Effectiveness: The unified platform eliminates the need for separate hardware and management tools for different storage types, leading to substantial cost savings.
- Flexible Data Access: Organizations can leverage both file-based (NAS) and block-based storage protocols from the same system, adapting to various application requirements.
For NetApp customers, NAS and block storage can coexist in a single environment, reducing infrastructure complexity and cost. This unified approach strengthens resiliency by creating a flexible foundation that adapts to changing workload needs while ensuring data remains available and operations stay efficient, regardless of how the data is stored or accessed.
Introducing Object Storage
Nothing is more familiar than the traditional mapped drive that users click on to access their remote file shares. NetApp has long provided this capability alongside block storage, which is optimized for virtualized environments and database applications. However, as part of its evolution beyond traditional storage, NetApp now offers advanced object storage solutions to meet the diverse data management requirements of modern enterprises.
Object-based storage is driven by API based workloads and by the transition to cloud. It is the preferred data storage method for API-driven applications, AI and ML workloads, and aligns well with cloud-native applications. Object storage can handle vast amounts of unstructured data more efficiently than traditional systems. It is also immutable by design, as objects cannot be edited without creating a new version, which provides a built-in audit trail. This immutability is ideal in a growing age of regulatory compliance and data governance.
NetApp’s combination of object storage, NAS, and block storage creates a complete data management solution that strengthens IT resilience. This multi-faceted approach allows organizations to adapt to evolving data management needs, protect against cyber threats, ensure compliance, and maintain business continuity in the face of disruptions.
Unified Solutions for a Hybrid World
While few organizations are completely cloud-first, even fewer are content to limit themselves to exclusively on-premises infrastructure. Most enterprises are striving to extend their reach beyond traditional data centers, and NetApp is at the forefront of meeting this demand. By offering a unified operational experience, NetApp ensures consistency and seamless management across both on-premises and cloud environments. Whether the cloud serves as adjunct, primary, or secondary storage, NetApp provides the tools to fully manage and integrate it into your ecosystem.
For example, a retail organization with multiple stores can use NetApp to centralize IT resources at a primary data center while seamlessly integrating public cloud services. This flexibility allows businesses to place infrastructure where it makes the most sense and use cloud resources as if they were part of the NetApp ecosystem. The result is not only simplified management but also the ability to scale and adapt with ease. This versatile approach has solidified NetApp’s reputation as a leader in delivering solutions tailored to the demands of a hybrid IT world
Expansive Management with Less to Learn
In an on-premises environment, data administrators often prefer to avoid the time and effort needed to learn new proprietary solutions. However, integrating a new public cloud provider typically demands learning new skill sets to manage platforms like Azure or AWS. NetApp customers, however, enjoy the best of both worlds. They can seamlessly expand into hybrid cloud environments without the need to relearn anything.
This means that regardless of how much you scale to the cloud, you can manage these new resources through the same NetApp portal used for on-premises systems. This means that all data management tasks, whether for on-premises or cloud resources, can be performed using a single pane of glass. If you are a NetApp customer, your hard-earned expertise continues to be relevant and valuable regardless of where your expansion takes you. Now that is resiliency.
Where Evolving Solutions Fits In
At Evolving Solutions, we have been a trusted NetApp partner for many years because we understand the value their solutions bring to our customers. NetApp is a powerful tool, but we often find that our clients are not fully utilizing its potential. To help you maximize NetApp for your environment, we first take the time to understand your business. This initial phase allows us to explore more than just NetApp, discussing Modern Operations and their relevance to your daily business needs. We also offer guidance on resiliency, helping you proactively address potential challenges. If you are an existing NetApp customer, we can help you unlock its full potential. If not, let us work with you to create a plan for greater resiliency in your organization.