By Umesh Manathkar, CIO

With the challenges of serving a complex, global enterprise, NetApp IT is a strong proponent of the hybrid cloud. It is the best – and realistically only – option for giving the organization what it needs to run and grow the business. 

Why do we believe this? What is our rationale? The business case for embracing the hybrid cloud is strong, but what are we looking to gain from the cloud, now and in the future? 

More Flexibility, Reasonable Costs 

Enterprise needs change daily and it is our responsibility to give our teams what they need, when they need it. For quick scaling and resource delivery, the cloud (either public or private) is the only reasonable option. It is incumbent on us to respond to business needs as quickly as possible. The cloud does this for us. 

With a robust FinOps strategy, we are avoiding the biggest drawback to a full embrace of the cloud – spiraling costs. We have been able to avoid shocking bills from hyperscalers by leveraging our own products, like Spot, and a system of governance that ensures that we maximize the return on investment in our cloud spend. 

Better Security and Resilience 

With an increasingly remote workforce, there has never been a more challenging time for security teams. More touchpoints outside office walls means more opportunities for bad actors to take advantage of security flaws. Identity management, misconfiguration, and change control are all concerns. 

In our hybrid cloud environment, however, we have full visibility into what is happening and where it is happening. Cloud Insights enables us to identify risks before they turn into breaches. Related, there is also concerns about ransomware, which we mitigate with OnTap SNAP technology that protect us should the worst happen. 

Better Insights 

Related to the above, having eyes on our entire ecosystem at all times is a challenge–and blind spots can happen. Between on-prem resources, cloud environments across multiple vendors, and countless virtual machines, there are multiple threats to an efficient operation. 

Idle resources are wasted dollars and knowing where these are happening and how much they are costing us enables us to run a lean, streamlined operation. Full monitoring of our stack from top to bottom uncovers trouble spots before they become, well, troublesome. 

Ultimately our goals in the hybrid cloud are to provide the most for the least. NetApp is doing amazing things, but the company cannot do this without an IT operation that is delivering every day.