Surfing is considered a way life for many along the coast of South Africa – riding wave after wave and flowing with the current; while technology – specifically cloud computing and flash – is changing the way businesses operate and the way we communicate and interact with one another: essentially changing the way we live our daily lives, says Mark Ridley, regional director for Africa, NetApp.
While seemingly different on the surface, the adoption and evolution of cloud and flash – or any new enterprise technology category – is in many ways, a lot like surfing. When a new category of enterprise technology is introduced, there’s a series of waves organisations and IT must navigate.
The first wave is a bit choppy: the introduction of the technology and adoption by a small group of organisations willing to take the risk to see if it works. The second wave sees more enterprises adopting the technology and integrating it into the fringe areas of their networks to see if it works for their needs. Finally, the third wave is the wide spread adoption of the technology.
As NetApp’s CTO Jay Kidd mentioned in his annual technology predictions, hybrid clouds would become the dominant vision for enterprise IT in 2014. This is in part due to the need to efficiently manage the exponential data growth; as well as, allow enterprises to make business critical decision in real-time to stay competitive.
While the cloud is still evolving, at this point it’s safe to say that it is riding the riding the third wave and has become integral to how businesses operate around the globe.
That said, all cloud architectures – whether public, private or hybrid – will be essentially built on the same technologies. Moving forward, the key differentiators will be driven by software capabilities; optimising the functionality of the hardware to enable more efficient data management across environments and seamless integration with legacy equipment.
The sea of data is only going to increase and thankfully today’s data infrastructure hardware is engineered to meet the data loads of today and tomorrow. Where companies will derive competitive value is the ability to manage data efficiently across the multi-tiered environments.
It is this idea – seamless data management and integration – that drove the recent refresh of NetApp’s entire FAS line, enabling companies to pool storage resources into clusters and to seamlessly move data sets across clusters to keep applications and operations running nonstop.
This vision for data is also the key reason behind our latest cloud news, which is a cloud-integrated solution that enables direct, secure connections to Microsoft Azure – unlocking the power of the hybrid cloud. NetApp is working with partners to enable customers to simply and securely extend into the cloud, expanding options for enterprises, without adding complexity.
Our vision is to enable workloads to move seamlessly across a portfolio of cloud resources. With more organisations extending the value of their IT infrastructure with the benefits of a hybrid cloud, enterprises need to be able to build an agile cloud infrastructure that balances private and cloud resources to optimize business outcomes.
Data ONTAP is a Universal Data Platform, it provides advanced data services that are available across all types of storage NetApp and third-party providers, allowing legacy resources to be linked in a cloud data fabric. By allowing seamless integration with legacy equipment, companies can improve data efficiently across a multi-tiered environment without needing to overhaul the network infrastructure, maximizing ROI on previous IT investments.
Consider what Orange Business Services did with cloud to see how it is helping customers achieve business outcomes. “The company redefined its business with end-to-end, global IT systems in the cloud to help customers around the world transition from being operators of data centers to brokers of information services.
They reinvented themselves, using NetApp to blaze a path into cloud computing and bringing its Flexible Computing services to 220 countries and territories around the world. As a result, today Orange Business Services is helping customers make a seamless transition to the cloud with end-to-end, on-demand IT service delivery and is on track to achieve its cloud revenue goals,” commented spokesperson.
As the cloud evolves and the current of data becomes more intense, it’s critical to have an infrastructure in place that manages data intelligently and efficiently, rather than restraining it. As with surfing: it’s easier to go with the current than against it.
