Looking beyond the year from Dell...to a bright future in 2021 with NetApp

 Looking beyond the year from Dell...to a bright future in 2021 with NetApp 

Never has making new year's predictions felt more daunting or better yet, more filled with irony. Luckily, the bar is low with the abysmal success rate of 2020 forecasts. This year was full of turmoil and uncertainty juxtaposed with opportunities to pause, reflect, and transform.  

The concept of work life balance was shaken up in a snow globe that has yet to settle and sort itself out. Collectively we were forced to take stock and concentrate on what matters most. Business is about people working together to create products and services that solve problems for other people. It’s sometimes easy to forget this, especially in the high-tech world of IOPS, latency, NVMe and CI/CD. Organizations that were able to focus, pivot, and rise to meet new challenges continue to thrive. 

Amidst the chaos, consistent themes have emerged that apply across all aspects of our lives. Rather than participate in a futile exercise of predicting the hottest tech trends in 2021, lets apply the big life lessons learned in 2020 to some of the most important data management challenges businesses are sure to face in 2021.  

1. Declutter – It’s time to get your house in order; clean out closets, purge and reorganize space. Keep what brings you joy and let go of things that no longer serve you. The same principal applies to your data. It’s time to look at your data center and identify opportunities to optimize and modernize.  
2. Establish Connection – Our relationships are precious, and the pandemic forced us to be more intentional about creating opportunities to connect with each other. The same goes for enterprise applications and data. Being able to connect your modern data center to the cloud and deliver a consistent experience is going to be a differentiator in 2021.  
3. Be flexible – Adapt and overcome was a good mantra for 2020. Flexibility will continue to be key as we navigate what is to come when the sun sets on December 31. Flexible financing options ensure business agility. The advent of the cloud brought with it a new way to manage the books by shifting traditional CapEx spend to an OpEx model. Innovative businesses have adapted to bring this same flexibility to traditional IT spend as well. 
4. Cultivate resilience – Many of us have repeatedly exercised the muscles that allow us to bounce back from adversity and build strength this year. In the world of data management this translates into a strong backup strategy with reliable data protection capabilities.  
5. Practice gratitude – This life is a gift. Many of us can work remotely, support our families, and give back to our communities, while many cannot. At NetApp we are grateful for our customers, our partners, and the colleagues we work side by side with every day. We are also grateful for our competitors. Competition fuels innovation. It’s good for our customers and it’s good for the economy. The likes of Dell and Pure help us keep the bar high in the primary storage market. NetApp’s cloud leadership ensures that our customers will have access to the most differentiated, software defined storage across their entire data fabric to fuel their own innovation.