Is a Data Fabric the secret to seamlessly integrating new innovations?

Every year, new opportunities for creating new products, services and business models are revealed. All we need to do, it seems, is embracing innovative technology such as AI, blockchain, IoT, DevOps, containers, microservices, and hybrid cloud.

This is easier said than done when we’re managing a range of traditional and cloud-native applications across both legacy on-premise infrastructure and hybrid cloud environments. While our customers may be expecting us to deliver cutting-edge experiences and services, we are often hamstrung by the need to efficiently manage data in such a complex technology landscape.

What we need is a digital transformation project that puts the right data in the right places throughout our operations and value chains. This level of digital maturity requires you to gain new levels of mastery over the flow of data within your business.

But data is dynamic, and it comes in almost infinite forms. When we consider that more than 80% of the data within our storage infrastructure is unstructured data, the question becomes: how can we turn the movement and management of data into a new competitive advantage?

Our clients are able to move from merely maintaining data, to fully leveraging data as a business enabler by creating a Data Fabric – allowing you to:

• modernise storage from being simply an afterthought
• create a truly next-gen datacentre
• better harness the power of hybrid cloud
• unleash the full power of your data

The key to seamlessly integrating new innovations is to architect an environment in which data can be used in multiple locations by our chosen applications and infrastructure. At the same time, you need control over your data, so this environment can’t add more complexity into your data management and infrastructure planning process.

The Data Fabric from NetApp provides a solution by weaving together data across sites, physical boundaries, and across applications.  It provides a platform for managing data that puts your IT team in control by providing:

• Complete data visibility: This means insights into performance, capacity, and cost for resources and application planning, along with analytics application integrations.
• Complete access and control: Migrate to and from on-premises and cloud environments, with replication, business continuity, data tiering for efficiency, and complete access across locations and applications
• Complete protection and security: Perform your data backup and recovery, archive and retention, copy data management, encryption, as well as application integration all with a seamless process that moves from reactive to proactive.

We know enterprises are under tremendous pressure to harness new innovations for creating new value across the entire organisation. Thriving in this environment requires a data-centric approach to managing data that is secure, efficient, and future-proof, and provides freedom of choice. This is how the NetApp Data Fabric ultimately helps your organisation unleash the power of data to meet business demands and gain a competitive edge. 

About the author:

As the Senior Vice President of NetApp Across APAC and Japan, my team and I partner with organisations to help them modernize IT and deliver a seamless hybrid multicloud experience through their own Data Fabric. If you’d like to discuss how your business can begin creating the Data Fabric that will enable you to reduce data complexity while preparing for the next generation of innovative technology, please feel free to contact me at [email protected].