Delivering cloud with confidence

The industry has spoken: As much as customers are embracing the dynamic elasticity and unlimited scale of the cloud, they are equally demanding the security and associated confidence of enterprise technologies. A recent Gartner report noting current trends in IT states that “data center teams will adopt cloud principles on-premises,” but also that “35% of data center infrastructure will be managed from a cloud-based control plane by 2027.” Gartner also notes that cloud teams specifically will refactor infrastructure in “a series of steps… building business resilience rather than service-level redundancy.”

The challenge lies in bringing these efforts and these teams together.

No one disputes the escalating value—and vulnerability—of the data that drives today’s businesses. Data powers business operations, fuels innovation, and creates exceptional customer experiences. But the impact of potential data loss or corruption, combined with a dramatic rise in cyberthreats and ransomware attacks, puts this competitive engine at risk. Recently, the challenge has become even tougher as data normally spans both on-premises and multiple cloud environments. That complexity means that the equation needed to protect data from failure, loss, error, and attack has become a Gordian Knot of technology. Add skills shortages and budget constraints across these varied environments, and you see why threat protection is increasingly multifaceted. 

Today, NetApp is proud to announce a new level of cyber-resilience capabilities that can safeguard your hybrid multicloud landscape while preserving simplicity and consistency. We have released newly enhanced data protection capabilities in the NetApp^® BlueXP™ unified control plane, which delivers global visibility and operational simplicity of storage and data services across on-premises and cloud environments. Now you can simply and easily implement the full spectrum of 3-2-1 backup strategies—on a workload-by-workload basis—across these environments from a single point of control. To satisfy your workload policies and the regulations that they need to conform to, your data protection strategy can range from simple backup, to 3-2-1 variants, to backups that provide redundancy, immutability, and indelibility. There’s no backup software to license, there are no backup or media servers to provision, and no software patches are required. And there’s no need for different snapshot creation, backup, security, or search tools. Even better, you can achieve this range of protection through policy-driven automation, slashing the possibility of human error.

But why stop there? We have extended this single point of control to other applications and workloads that BlueXP supports. To shorten the dreaded backup window, it’s always important to enable these backups to be as close to instantaneous as possible, but for database applications, that timing is crucial. So we have enhanced this innovative block-level, incremental-forever data protection technology with broader support for application-consistent backup of database environments in all major clouds. This enhancement includes the newly released capability to simply and easily protect Oracle Database workloads running on Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, the fully managed storage service that’s native to the world’s largest public cloud. The result is backup windows that are 100 times shorter than with NDMP implementations. That’s real value.

But cyber resilience isn’t just about backing up data. You need to protect those very backups from bad actors. The bad guys are getting more creative. Sometimes they are intent on inflicting damage, and when they run into an immutable backup, they may simply try to delete it (and your protection along with it). The BlueXP backup and recovery service enables immutable backups that add another layer of protection to prevent encryption or changes. And it enables backups that are also indelible to resist deletion unless you have more than one trusted admin involved or a certain amount of time has passed. (And most ransomware bad actors don’t hang around for a few years.)

These simple point-and-click capabilities are available across NetApp ONTAP^® systems regardless of where you store your data. NetApp is truly putting “cloud” in hybrid cloud.

As I mentioned earlier, the most demanding users of technology are responding with confidence to the proven cyber resilience that’s built into our integrated offerings. Our software-defined storage for the public cloud, NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, has long offered the full range of ONTAP capabilities in all three major public clouds. Its users continue to benefit from the most secure profile available. Because of its proven security and resilience profile, Cloud Volumes ONTAP is now a trusted resource that’s available through the AWS Marketplace for the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC). The AWS Marketplace offerings for the U.S. IC include a broad array of common software infrastructure, developer tools, and business software products that support the unique needs of the U.S. IC. They provide improved security, increased mission impact, and cost savings.

In concert with these developments, we’re also releasing new capabilities that enable additional deployment modes for BlueXP and related services. Customers in highly secure industries can use cloud-oriented management even in restricted government clouds or “dark site” environments. The newly released BlueXP restricted mode lets you deploy workloads in sovereign cloud regions with limited outbound, unidirectional connectivity to the BlueXP software-as-a-service (SaaS) back end. And you still have access to storage, backup and recovery, and governance and classification services within the sovereign cloud. The newly released BlueXP private mode lets you deploy the control plane in local data centers with no external connectivity, along with key services for storage, backup and recovery, and governance and classification.

Our customers are some of the most demanding users of technology across the globe. Although not all of them are government intelligence agencies, global financial institutions, or leading-edge pharma innovation companies, they share one constant: Data is life. Data is sacrosanct. They rely on NetApp to enable the strongest cyber-resilience profile against failures, catastrophes, human error, and bad actors—regardless of where their data lives or which workloads it supports. We take that trust seriously, and our investments and recent releases are a testament to that fact. Let us tell you more about it; I think you’ll be impressed.

To learn how you can simplify operations and strengthen your cyber resilience, contact us or read the BlueXP overview.