Bridging the Data Gap: It Takes a Specialist to Build the Right Structure

Earlier this year, my family and I took a long weekend trip to my parent's house. On our eight-hour cross-Texas journey (yes eight hours of driving and still in the same state), we had to travel across a bridge, and it got me thinking. Crossing rivers wasn’t always as easy as driving over a bridge.

There was a time when cowboys would punch cattle up north to take them to sale. The most vulnerable part of their journey was not the hostile bandits they might encounter or the desert where there was little water. It was crossing the rivers. There was no way of knowing the depth or speed or the drop-off point. It was a very perilous stage of the journey.

The cloud journey can be like that. You know that the obstacle is getting your data safely to its destination, but there’s that fear before you embark. What’s the risk? What’s your exposure?

Taking the fear out of the innovation

Nowadays, when I’m driving my family back and forth to Amarillo, we cross those same rivers the cowboys did, but we don’t have to swim the Colorado River or worry about the current. We can focus on the fun part of the trip: getting our kids and all their toys and necessities to Nana’s house.

The safety component has been taken care of by the team who designed a solid bridge for us to cross. They knew the right materials to use, the impact of soil alkalinity, and the mathematical equations that make the structure sound. They were specialists.

In the journey to cloud, the same is true. If you want to move and manage your data, you need a team of professionals who understand everything there is to know about data, how to store it, how to access it, and how to keep it safe. A qualified team of specialists can remove the fear and help you get to innovation faster, easier, and more securely.

The 3 important aspects of data bridge building

As you stare into the murky, fast-moving waters of data migration, you might be deterred by that same fear the cowboys felt crossing dangerous rivers.

Our team at NetApp has three conversations that help remove the fear and build the bridge:

1.     Migrating the un-migratable

2.     Reduction in business risk

3.     Velocity to engagements

Migrating the un-migratable

When migrating to cloud, the complexity of applications can be a challenge. SAP workloads and the data they entertain are the mission-critical lifeblood of a business but going through the migration path requires downtime on your install for days on end, which can be perilous.

Jeff Whitaker, Senior Manager Cloud Data Services at NetApp, explains: “As we migrate more of the applications, we start to run into those core enterprise business applications that just need more. They are often considered un-migratable because of these challenges… If you need your applications to be up and running all the time, you often have to build in a lot of architecture, build in a lot of things there that you now have to manage, just to get to the complexity that you’ve come to expect.”

With Azure NetApp Files you get the availability, performance, and enterprise management features your applications require, so there are no un-migratable workloads.

Reduction in risk: A shift in the center of gravity

2020 has been a fearful year, and it’s required a lot of shifts in our center of gravity. Now, as we stare into the abyss that is 2021, what's one way we can remove the fear within the data center?

With NetApp, we move data while keeping it in its natural format. It's a native extension of your business rather than a bolt-on capability, so concerns over security, performance, data set corruption, and unplanned outages—things that can literally kill a business—are removed.

Your data is vulnerable whenever you're not in standard IT operations, so reducing the threat of a security breach during migration is critical. With NetApp you also reduce the risk of data loss by reducing the time that the application isn't set up and running in a normal format. And with our proprietary tools such as XCP and X-Pack, you get that best-of-breed, quicker operation during what we in the military used to call “time on target.”

Reduce the time on target, and you reduce the time you're most vulnerable. With Azure NetApp Files (ANF), we remove that fear within the data center. And that means NetApp is the best way to adapt to that new center of gravity.

Velocity in cloud migration for SAP customers

Once you’ve tested the waters and know the depth, you’re ready for the deep dive, knowing that you’ve mitigated the risk. From here, you’re looking forward to a smooth journey from data to innovation, the ultimate payoff in data storage and management.

Lalit Patil, CTO for HANA Enterprise Cloud, SAP puts it best when he tells us about the importance of speed in getting to market. “With ANF (Azure NetApp Files) we get scalability and flexibility, which is important for businesses to run and have a faster time-to-market for their products. With ANF, we’re able to deploy environments almost 30-40% faster. We’re able to reduce the total amount of outages by 80% because of the stability that ANF provides. This is enabling our customers to adopt cloud in a much faster way.”

For NetApp, this isn't new. It’s a business practice that we’ve established across multiple sets of our partners, so you’re not a test subject. Our partners have built solutions for SAP in cloud and are standardizing on NetApp as they build those practices out.

Cloud isn’t only for side workloads

Data management in the cloud is not just for the easy-to-migrate side loads. You can trust the core of your business there, provided you are confident in the architecture that’s holding it up.

With our team of NetApp specialists and partners working together to build the bridge, you can rely on an outcome that is beneficial to your business but also provides flexibility. If conditions change, as they certainly did in 2020, we'll be able to examine that new destination and build an architecture adaptable to whatever 2021 brings your way.