The News: NetApp used its Analyst Summit last week to lay out its strategy for bringing customers along in a hybrid multicloud world, emphasizing its data services on-premises and in public clouds. CEO George Kurian said NetApp is now in the phase of “building a competitive moat” around its data services, which requires NetApp to extend its data services – data protection, security governance, and compliance – beyond only serving traditional enterprise IT buyers.
NetApp Analyst Summit: Building a Moat Around Data Services
Analyst Take: NetApp used its Analyst Summit last week to lay out its strategy for bringing customers along in a hybrid multicloud world, emphasizing its data services on-premises and in public clouds.
“Data is everywhere and everywhere there is data, there will be NetApp,” was the mantra repeated by several NetApp executives.
NetApp has already gone far down that path, taking the ONTAP storage system that runs on its (increasingly all-flash) on-premises arrays into the three major public clouds with Cloud Volumes ONTAP (CVO), Azure NetApp Files, AWS FSx for NetApp ONTAP, and Google Cloud Volumes Service.
NetApp is a first-party partner for Azure and AWS, meaning it is sold, billed, and supported by the hyperscalers, and native-integrated in their consoles and APIs. NetApp has also built a cloud ops portfolio through acquisition and development, including Spot for optimization, Cloud Insights for monitoring, Instaclustr for database-as-a-service, and Astra for cloud-native data protection.
Data Services Take Center Stage
CEO George Kurian said NetApp is now in the phase of “building a competitive moat” around its data services. That objective requires NetApp to extend its data services – data protection, security governance, and compliance – beyond only serving traditional enterprise IT buyers.
New buying personas include:
- Cloud architects and CTO teams designing modern architectures and migrating applications to public clouds
- Application and process owners that are not traditional storage professionals
- Platform engineering teams bringing Kubernetes and DevOps teams together with infrastructure teams
At the center of the NetApp data services strategy is BlueXP, a unified control plane for deploying hybrid multicloud environments around NetApp’s storage infrastructure, software, and services. NetApp will also make BlueXP available to service providers and other partners.
Cyber-Resilience Spearheads NetApp Data Services
Kurian emphasized that a key NetApp goal is to deliver “world-class data management with built-in cyber-resilience.” With the onslaught of cyber-attacks, cyber-resilience requires ever-more sophisticated and earlier detection methods. Effective cyber-resilience brings unique requirements, such as the ability to uncover and preserve good data changes and execute surgical recoveries, this is no surprise.
NetApp has formed a new data services team, complementing its on-premises and cloud data storage teams. Gagan Gulati, VP of Product Management for the new team, explained in breakout and one-on-one sessions how NetApp is evolving core data services competencies (spanning backup and recovery, disaster recovery, ransomware protection, and data governance and compliance). It is strongly focused on protecting hybrid multicloud workloads (this includes SaaS applications) and developing more sophisticated capabilities for protecting against malicious attacks (in addition to the typical disasters such as hurricanes, and general data loss incidents).
NetApp is striving to make cyber-resiliency capabilities easy for IT Operations to implement across clouds. This targets the critical pain point of limited IT staff resources, which Futurum Group hears about consistently in conversation with IT Operations teams. It also helps to accelerate time-to-protection across hybrid multicloud environments. That is a major reason NetApp has developed BlueXP as a services-oriented consumption model.
Besides backups and snapshots, cyber-resiliency also spans data discovery and detection, response, and recovery. For NetApp Data Services, this includes obtaining visibility across the data estate, and identifying the most critical data and privacy risks to shore up vulnerabilities, ensure that all protection service level agreements (SLAs) are met, and better direct recovery efforts to the most critical assets following a ransomware attack.
NetApp is including ML-based anomaly detection to uncover malware, including ransomware. It allows IT teams to identify their “last known good” recovery point (a key challenge in ransomware recovery for IT teams). It also allows for recovery from various snapshots, helping to mitigate data loss.
NetApp also offers a unique ransomware recovery guarantee. NetApp will offer compensation if snapshot data cannot be recovered with the assistance of NetApp or a NetApp partner in the event of a ransomware attack. The intention is zero data loss from ransomware for data that is stored on NetApp infrastructure.
NetApp’s Next Steps
NetApp already has a strong hybrid and multicloud position, thanks to its deep integration with the major hyperscalers and its long history of on-premises storage systems. Its plan for expanding data services around protection, security, and governance is sound and necessary in today’s IT world. As we track NetApp’s execution of that plan, there are a few areas we will watch closely:
Can NetApp convince customers of BlueXP’s value? BlueXP launched in late 2022 but there are still questions around its utility, and what it does. Futurum Group would like NetApp to specify what problems BlueXP can solve. At the Summit, NetApp executives received questions about BlueXP licensing (it is free) and how it compares to NetApp features such as ONTAP One (a data management suite), Keystone (a STaaS program), and Astra (container-native storage). BlueXP can be used to manage and monitor NetApp features and services – not replace them. There are still pieces missing. The CloudOps capabilities are not part of BlueXP, and not all of BlueXP’s capabilities support non-NetApp technology (outside of the governance/compliance and copy/sync capabilities). A customer who uses Azure NetApp Files or FSx NetApp, among other services in Azure or AWS, may find it easier to manage through the cloud dashboards than BlueXP.
How will NetApp engage with CISOs and other security personas? This topic was missing from NetApp’s big picture messaging. But when we spent time jointly with Gulati and NetApp’s CISO, their collaboration was clear (“We are customer zero!”). Futurum expects NetApp’s positioning to this persona to become clearer, including ways it can help to facilitate the growing collaboration between IT Ops and security teams.
How deep into data protection will NetApp go? Another area for NetApp to clarify is where its capabilities play compared to those from third-party data protection providers (including those that its customers already use, and those that NetApp partners with). Enterprises run a variety of data protection tools for a variety of use cases. Making it clear where and how NetApp adds value will prove critical to the success of its Data Services business.
Can NetApp win over DevOps? Astra is NetApp’s answer for provisioning and protecting persistent storage for Kubernetes applications. Astra is available as self-managed software or a fully-managed service. It provides a control plane and includes NetApp Trident container storage interface (CSI) drivers for container storage plus support for cloud-native storage platforms. But container storage is primarily used today outside of IT operations. NetApp will have to convince DevOps that Astra Control’s orchestration capabilities are good enough to match those of container-native storage products such as Pure Storage’s Portworx or IBM Storage Fusion. While container native-storage products may be early in their adoption cycle, we expect that will change as Kubernetes production applications continue to scale.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other insights from The Futurum Group:
Data Reduction Guarantees – NetApp Has a New Approach
NetApp Adds Perpetual Refresh Consumption Model Option
Data Management in a Multi-Cloud World
Author Information
Dave focuses on the rapidly evolving integrated infrastructure and cloud storage markets.
Krista Case brings over 15 years of experience providing research and advisory services and creating thought leadership content. Her vantage point spans technology and vendor portfolio developments; customer buying behavior trends; and vendor ecosystems, go-to-market positioning, and business models. Her work has appeared in major publications including eWeek, TechTarget and The Register.
