How NetApp Cloud Services Makes Any SRE’s Job Easier

NetApp Cloud Central[/caption] It’s no secret that IT is becoming more and more complex. Organizations are no longer simply relying on their on-premises infrastructure to keep their business running. With cloud becoming an essential component of nearly every IT strategy, organizations are using a variety of cloud tools to develop, test, and bring products to market—many of which are running outside the umbrella of corporate IT.

At the same time, customers are demanding that their apps and services are available 24/7—downtime is not an option. An outage of any size or duration can severely impact an organization’s reputation with customers, to say nothing about lost revenue or productivity. But with data spread out across so many different platforms, services, and management structures, whose job is it to make sure that the data is there when it needs to be? Enter the SRE.

A Site Reliability Engineer, or SRE, is in charge of making sure that an organization’s IT infrastructure is reliable. The SRE is the single point of contact for the customer when it comes to storage, interfacing with cloud providers, partners, and storage manufacturers to make sure that data is secure and available at all times, no matter where the data goes or how it’s being accessed or used.

At this point, you might be thinking, “Easier said than done!” And you’d be right. Each cloud service in a customer’s environment treats data differently depending on what it’s used for. An SRE is responsible for providing the management oversight and organization to make sure that no matter where your data lives, whether that’s in a hyperscale cloud, on-premises, or in partner colocation facility, it’s protected and available.

For many organizations, the life of an SRE can be extremely challenging. Trying to wrangle a huge variety of disparate storage systems from different manufacturers is hard enough, but when you add in any number of one-off cloud services into the mix, data management becomes a mess. Rather than spending their time trying to provide value for the organization, SREs are hampered by inefficient data management tasks that could easily be automated or streamlined if the IT infrastructure was designed from the ground up for data mobility and security.

With NetApp, an SRE’s life becomes much easier, especially when it comes to managing data in the cloud. Instead of having all of these one-off cloud services throughout your organization, you can use NetApp’s cloud data services to deliver the cloud capabilities your teams need without the management hassle. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP lets you take advantage of cloud elasticity and cost efficiency for a variety of clouds, including AWS and Azure, while giving you the ability to move your data to wherever you need it. And it’s all backed by the enterprise-grade security and reliability that NetApp has been known for in the industry for over 25 years. For an SRE, this helps you pivot to meet changing customer demands while standardizing on security and compliance. NetApp Kubernetes service gives you the ability to deploy a variety of cloud-native solutions on all the major clouds, so teams can develop and deploy on demand without spinning up “shadow IT” services.

As an SRE, having your customer run their cloud services on NetApp also gives you the ability to automate more of the manual data management tasks so you can focus on helping customers extract value from their data. With a unified data management environment built on NetApp cloud services, you can easily show your customers ways that they can optimize their infrastructure and streamline processes. You don’t need to be stuck in the data center or on the phone all day trying to make everything work together—it just does. That’s the beauty of a NetApp Data Fabric, and it’s all available today.

Check out what NetApp cloud services can do for you at cloud.netapp.com.