How NetApp Enables Organizations to Build and Execute a Comprehensive Cloud Strategy

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The fact that cloud is here to stay has ramifications for both business and technical operations. Organizations always have the option to run virtual machines (VMs) in the cloud and have everything look like a traditional data center. But taking full advantage of the cloud requires a different level of thinking.

Think of how electricity works. If you look at a light switch, you don’t think about which utility company the electricity to power it comes from. You just want it to work. The same holds true for data management on the cloud. Getting the most out of cloud capabilities requires bringing that transparency you have in on-premises data centers to the world’s primary hyperscalers.

Security is also a major consideration for enterprises. Cloud offers new possibilities for backup copies and spreading workloads out geographically, both for disaster recovery and general availability. Backups are becoming a prized target of ransomware attacks. In such an event, your organization is faced with the choice of accepting the financial expense of paying or suffering the data loss. Once those data and VMs are lost, the data is very difficult to recover.

Skilled Architects; Integrated Solutions

Over the past three decades NetApp has continued to evolve its leading software solutions and expand its comprehensive portfolio of products and services that help organizations optimize their infrastructure with better management to get the most out of their data by leveraging the cloud. NetApp’s innovations enable you to use the same APIs in your on-premises data center as well as the public cloud. The development is the same across multiple cloud environments, resulting in less code, less troubleshooting, and increased efficiencies.

NetApp solutions include:

• A single drag-and-drop interface for integrating environments across public clouds: NetApp simplifies building and monitoring your environment with its Cloud Manager. With this tool, you can enable centralized storage management, simplify provisioning, leverage automatic capacity scaling, and support cloud storage automation and orchestration.
• Disaster recovery and ransomware protection: Back up immutable copies of VMs to the public hyperscalers so you rest assured your backups can’t be deleted or modified.
• A data management layer: Cloud Volumes ONTAP enables you to optimize performance and storage costs while enhancing security and compliance.
• A monitoring layer: Cloud Insights allows you to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize your valuable resources and critical enterprise applications across your entire IT stack, both on-prem and in the cloud.
• End-to-end security: The public hyperscalers have large, dedicated teams of people working on security. NetApp has taken a further step in securing data sets with encryption technologies. If you’re using a VPN tunnel you’ve got that piece encrypted, then NetApp SnapMirror or volumes have the ability to encrypt data. Below that, when you’re running a VM in the cloud, a tethering capability allows you to encrypt those containers so even the disk the VM is sitting on is encrypted.
• Data tiering: Prioritize data storage based on user needs. Hot data (i.e., anything that’s accessed frequently) stays on the primary tier. Data that hasn’t been accessed recently (e.g., 60 days) goes on a cold tier
• Application-driven infrastructure through Spot: Spot by NetApp enables you to compare and better manage costs with public cloud providers. Spot by NetApp can investigate your applications and automatically optimize them based on policies you establish.
• Reducing costs with deduplication: Deduplication eliminates excess copies of data, helping to reduce overall storage costs. While not a new concept, NetApp continues to bring you the same on-premise efficiencies in public clouds. The end result is that your organization can have the freedom and flexibility to navigate between cloud service providers with an API-driven experience so developers can write code once without needing to customize builds for different cloud environments.
• Data portability for long-term cloud economics: Enterprises migrate to the cloud for the benefits of agility, but IT leaders often realize that their organization’s monthly hyperscaler bills become complex, costly and unmanageable. NetApp brings data portability to your cloud strategy so you can easily utilize data across multiple public clouds—or pull it back on premises if/when that better serves the needs of the organization.
• Virtual Desktop Service (VDS): The data management layer, VDS, helps you spin up environments quickly in public cloud environments.

Getting Cloud Storage Right

These and other NetApp innovations combine to provide a comprehensive experience, with numerous IT benefits translating into business value. That includes savings on facility, heating, power, and cooling, as well as eliminating call centers and enabling remote work. That is why getting the cloud storage piece right makes sense for business stakeholders and IT leaders alike.

Learn more about how Evolving Solutions can help your organization optimize its cloud strategy.