Cloud Manager Digital Wallet: Hybrid cloud simplified experience

As a consumer, purchasing goods and services today is easy. I can buy almost anything through an app, on the web, or through a visit to a good old-fashioned brick-and-mortar store. The click of a button, drag-and-drop, or self-serve checkout makes it easy and quick. But although buying is easy, managing those purchases isn’t quite the same…where is the Easy button for managing the payments, returns, or exchanges?

I recently purchased a new home and received several house-warming presents (awesome!) to go with things that I had bought. But there were duplicates and items that I couldn’t use for various reasons, or that didn’t work as intended. I needed to return or exchange several items, and I certainly didn’t look forward to it. I organized everything for return or exchange, including receipts and gift receipts (if I received them), separated physical returns from what needed to be shipped, and so on. It was quite a process, taking time and cycles to complete that I really didn’t have. And tracking whether I really got a credit for the return – painful.

Similar complexities come into play in today’s hybrid multicloud world. Working environments across these data landscapes have individual procurement processes, licenses, and entitlements. Your storage as a service, or whatever as a service, has consumption models and management platforms that are probably quite different. The ability to control investments from a single pane of glass doesn’t seem to exist across your entire enterprise. And heaven help you if you find that you need something different than what you paid for, or that you didn’t use as planned.

What if there were a different way? A way that lets you deploy and manage all aspects of your hybrid multicloud storage and services with flexible consumption models to use, move, or exchange them as needed, regardless of where they are deployed, so that you never waste a dime? And what would you say if I told you that you can do this on demand from the same interface that your IT and CloudOps teams use to manage the data estate? Did I just blow your FinOps team’s collective mind? 

Announcing the next generation of NetApp Cloud Manager Digital Wallet.

A few months ago, we announced the Digital Wallet capability of NetApp^® Cloud Manager in the blog Cloud flexibility is for FinOps, too. Digital Wallet was powerful then, and today’s updates deliver added investment control with flexible consumption, enabling you to simplify consumption management, realize tighter resource control, and protect your IT investments.

Digital Wallet now enables centralized management of NetApp Keystone™, our pay-as-you-grow, storage-as-a-service (STaaS) offering that delivers a hybrid multicloud flexible consumption experience. The new Keystone integration empowers you to discover, visualize, monitor, provision, report, invoice, and manage subscriptions across your on-premises and cloud storage services. You have full FinOps control of your Keystone subscriptions from a single point of control.

Digital Wallet enhancements enable FinOps to realize tighter investment control through simplified management of NetApp ONTAP^® software and hardware licenses, as well as data services. From the dashboard, FinOps can extend software or hardware licenses, monitor and control that spending, and identify ONTAP on-premises working environments, whether they are added to Cloud Manager or not. ITOps teams can add those ONTAP environments to the Cloud Manager canvas with a click of a button, without going through a wizard process, adding IP addresses and credentials, and so on.

The Digital Wallet now enables further resource investment protection to exchange unused Cloud Volumes ONTAP node-based licenses for Cloud Backup, Cloud Tiering, and Cloud Data Sense licenses, or to convert FabricPool licenses to Cloud Tiering entitlements. Now you can easily reallocate storage spending across the hybrid multicloud data landscape through Keystone with one subscription across all clouds, using an operational and financial model that supports your data fabric vision. Services such as Cloud Volumes ONTAP and Cloud Backup can live under the same subscription as the on-premises (file, block, and object) data services, and you can reallocate spending for these as needed through Digital Wallet. This flexibility allows organizations to migrate data or workloads as it makes sense, across on-premises and cloud accounts, while maintaining a single invoice and overall spending profile.

Just as I wanted to simplify return and exchange processes for items I received for my new home, your FinOps teams need better control over your infrastructure investments. Thanks to the latest Digital Wallet enhancements, FinOps can fully control your STaaS subscription management from the same single point of control with which your IT and CloudOps teams manage the data landscape. FinOps gets tighter resource control and investment protection through the ability to exchange, float, covert, and reallocate storage spending as IT and CloudOps needs change.

ITOps, CloudOps, and FinOps teams all use the same playbook for flexibility, simplification, and protection through Cloud Manager and the enhanced Digital Wallet. If only moving to a new home were this easy.

You can learn more about Cloud Manager Digital Wallet on NetApp.com and Cloud.NetApp.com.