Busting myths and taking names, part 2: When it comes to enterprise apps, does flexible mean complicated?

In this blog series, we’re busting open four pervasive myths about enterprise applications.

Myth #2: When it comes to enterprise apps, flexible means complicated.

Organizations everywhere are turning to the cloud to achieve the flexibility and scalability to deploy their enterprise applications and get their products to market faster.

But even though public cloud seems like a perfect fit for those workloads that need instant, seamless scalability, not every company is ready to go all in. Only a tiny fraction (just 2%) of enterprises prefer to use public cloud exclusively. According to an IDC white paper, Cloud Fundamentals Done Right, 80% of organizations are already running hybrid and multicloud environments to get the benefits of the cloud without sacrificing security and resilience.

But what happens when every app that goes to the cloud gets its own infrastructure? You get islands of data, silos floating in a sea of out-of-control cloud costs and management headaches. This is the state of traditional hybrid cloud environments. What organizations want is flexibility and agility—the flexibility to choose where applications run best and the agility to respond quickly to business demands. But without a plan, they can end up with a hybrid cloud environment that is anything but flexible and is fraught with inconsistency, complexity, and limited scalability.

It reminds me of the early days of virtualization. It’s easy to forget that not everyone made the switch to virtualized environments overnight. In some cases it took years, depending on the workload and requirements. For example, organizations were using virtualization only for specific workloads. They certainly weren’t running everything on a virtualized environment. But then NetApp came into play with some innovative and robust data management offerings for virtualized workloads. We helped virtualization become more efficient, reliable, and simple. And now virtualization is the norm.

We’re in the same place now with respect to public cloud adoption. With our data fabric vision, NetApp helps organizations realize the true promise of cloud computing. Customers can run their workloads in the cloud and seamlessly manage their data wherever it is, regardless of what cloud provider they’re using. They can access it when they need it, they can protect it, they can recover it, and they can clone it quickly for dev/test. And they can do it all with the same management tools across their premises and the world’s biggest clouds. And voilà: Flexibility and simplicity all in one.

A global pharmaceutical giant is an example of what flexibility and simplicity look like in the real world. AstraZeneca is speeding the discovery process for life-saving treatments. With NetApp^® solutions, they built a hybrid, multicloud data strategy that enables the dynamic movement of data, so researchers can access the data they need, when they need it.

“The movement of workloads from the private cloud to our public cloud was time consuming. Scientists couldn’t do anything with the data, until we migrated it. We needed a hybrid, multi-cloud data fabric to move data to any cloud from any cloud.”

— Scott Hunter, Global Infrastructure Services Director, AstraZeneca

Whether it’s for dev/test, backup and disaster recovery, or production, most organizations will move some workloads to the cloud. NetApp helps them do that in a simple, seamless way. We bring the best of the cloud on premises and the best of on-premises capabilities to the cloud, for flexibility that truly is simple. So simple, in fact, that my colleague Matt Watts can show you how to build your hybrid cloud environment in just 5 minutes.

Only NetApp gives you the tools you need to:

• Standardize operations and management, with a unified experience on any cloud or on-premises infrastructure.
• Keep your core databases on premises or in any of the world’s largest clouds, and even move them across clouds on demand.
• Implement cutting-edge services to keep your enterprise app data protected and available 24/7.
• Give your developers the tools they need to get new innovations to market faster, with integrations into leading cloud-native services.
• Alleviate strain on your IT staff—leave the data management to the experts and focus on delivering value to your customers.

So does flexibility have to be complicated? Consider this another myth busted. Check out this infographic to see what other myths you can bust by partnering with NetApp, and learn how we take the complexity out of hybrid cloud.