Maya Zakhour, Channel Director, Middle East, Africa, Italy and Spain at NetApp, explains how the cloud will help businesses in the channel.
Cloud – public, private and hybrid – is proving to be the future-proof platform for all businesses. Year on year, cloud has become increasingly relied on by organisations across sectors and across the globe. The immense benefits of the cloud have been witnessed during the last few months when organisations relied on access to data and applications based in the cloud to maintain Business Continuity. This reliance continues as businesses return to a new normal.
The cloud has enabled small businesses to compete on equal terms with the giants. It enables line-of-business buyers with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), the application developer with PaaS and the DevOps or software reliability engineer with IaaS. Public clouds and hyperscalers like Google, AWS and Microsoft have simplified IT and provided ‘retailed’ compute to businesses.
Cloud computing brings a wide range of potential benefits to any organisation, which most business and IT leaders find too compelling to ignore. Cloud, be it public or private, is gaining traction among a growing number of enterprises looking to create a more efficient IT architecture with cost-effective storage and data management solutions that let those enterprises do more with less.
Digital Transformation initiatives have also accelerated and remain the top business priority, especially in today’s environment, and the public clouds offer the speed and flexibility needed to navigate this new normal as companies find new ways to work, interact and do business.
With a secure cloud solution, enterprises can deploy a cloud infrastructure that accelerates time to market with new services and increases operational efficiency and flexibility. Some key benefits include lower costs, improved agility, the opportunity to enable self-service provisioning and many others. While the benefits of the cloud are of immense value, there are still issues around data control, compliance and data management that raise red flags about moving strictly to a public cloud model. There are also issues with running enterprise apps designed to scale up in the scale-out cloud. For many businesses, the answer is to deploy a hybrid cloud.
With benefits that clearly outweigh the risks, and businesses embracing the power of the cloud, partners have great opportunity to develop specialisation, increase their Value Add and increase profitability. Today, NetApp is the cloud storage specialist and is focused on helping businesses get more from their cloud investments. Whether on-premises, in the cloud or anywhere in between, no one integrates, secures and connects your storage like NetApp does and this presents partners with ample opportunity to leverage our converged offerings in addition to taking advantage of our hyperscale partnerships.