Today, 88% of enterprises will be using hybrid cloud and 83% of those enterprises live in a hybrid multicloud world, per Frost & Sullivan’s 2023 Global Cloud User Survey (October 2023). With storage infrastructure spanning from on-premises data centers to one or more public clouds, what was once relatively straightforward is now quite complex. Controlling the chaos across these disparate environments through some form of unified management has never been more important.
Reducing complexity, simplifying operations, and enabling IT staff to keep the environment humming at peak performance is critical. Then there’s the need to deliver cyber resilience and data protection services, optimize costs through data mobility, support sustainability efforts, or take advantage of the latest and greatest technologies, such as generative AI.
Understanding these customer needs and technology trends, Frost & Sullivan recently conducted rigorous analysis to evaluate companies with hybrid cloud management solutions. They realize that their customers require strong management processes and need to utilize every IT resource available while consuming the fewest human resources possible. After conducting their detailed evaluation, Frost & Sullivan named NetApp the 2024 Company of the Year for hybrid cloud storage management.
For those who haven’t heard about Frost & Sullivan, they are a 60-year-old consulting company that was recently named to the Forbes 2023 list of Best Management Consulting Firms worldwide. Each year, they spend considerable resources to analyze best practices in innovation and bring this knowledge to their customers.
According to Frost & Sullivan, NetApp is the industry leader thanks in large part to NetApp® BlueXP™ technology. BlueXP provides unified control of storage and data services to support an intelligent data infrastructure across your hybrid multicloud. You can discover, deploy, manage, and optimize all your on-premises and cloud storage from a single point of control. With powerful AIOps, flexible consumption of resources, and integrated data services, it delivers the speed, simplicity, and security required to thrive in today’s highly complex world.
Frost & Sullivan’s ICT industry principal Karyn Price says that “BlueXP delivers seamless management across storage with integrated environment health and analytics, protection, governance, optimization, and mobility.” She goes on to explain that BlueXP “enables customers to create consistent and common policies, procedures, and services across all infrastructures under management, reducing the complexity of administering hybrid multicloud environments.”
Although NetApp has a long history of storage management, we focus not only on the storage infrastructure but also, just as important, on the data housed there. BlueXP makes the management of both easy by combining familiar tools with new capabilities. What’s more, its intuitive, AIOps-powered UI enables generalists to perform highly complex tasks that previously required advanced expertise. A perfect example is drag-and-drop simplicity to enable services and create relationships between any environment within your intelligent data infrastructure. Nothing could be easier.
“While different than the standard hybrid management platform, BlueXP fills a much-needed gap in the hybrid cloud management market, managing data storage and service infrastructure across the hybrid environment,” Price explains. “Its AIOps approach is forward-thinking and leads the market in terms of functionality for hybrid data and storage management.”
And, speaking of NetApp’s focus on your data, the services integrated into BlueXP maximize data protection and cyber resilience while minimizing costs. Its powerful AIOps drives the operational simplicity you need. BlueXP also helps you track and control all your licenses, subscriptions, and entitlements across your hybrid multicloud environment, unlocking investment protection and ROI. You even gain fact-based details about energy consumption and storage optimization to help you meet your corporate sustainability goals. With BlueXP, you know that your data is available, when you need it, where you want it, and as secure as you demand.
Frost & Sullivan concludes that with “NetApp’s BlueXP hybrid storage management platform, NetApp has met an unmet need in the hybrid cloud management industry, offering robust yet consistent storage management capabilities to its customers. For its strong overall performance, NetApp is recognized with Frost & Sullivan’s 2024 Global Company of the Year Award in the hybrid cloud storage management industry.” Click here to learn more about this award.
Thank you to all at Frost & Sullivan, from all of us at NetApp. We proudly accept this valuable recognition.
Please take this opportunity to learn more about BlueXP.
Cathi Allen is a long-time technologist. She started as a programmer and moved on to systems engineer, network and virtualization administrator, product management, and product marketing. Cathi has three master’s degrees: MSM – Information Systems Security, MBA – Project Management, MBA – Information Technology Management. Her thirty (30) plus years in the IT industry affords her the status of subject matter expert. She is currently the product marketing manager for Cloud Data Services at NetApp. She enjoys traveling, antiquing, movies, off-roading, camping, and hanging with her four-legged children.