Intelligent data infrastructure: The three most competitive words in the market

Anyone who has visited my home in Arizona knows that I love gardening—which, in the desert, can be quite challenging. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, however, it’s that healthy soil begets happy plants. Surprisingly, this simple lesson has a parallel in my day job, which is helping our customers gain maximum business value from their data. Let me explain. When organizations look to data to help drive better decision making, they sometimes overlook a fundamental aspect of the data equation: the underlying infrastructure that supports the data.

This oversight means that organizations can be hamstrung in their ability to take advantage of the massive opportunities associated with new technologies like AI, or to boost productivity in order to improve the bottom line. At the same time, without the right data infrastructure in place, organizations struggle to cope with disruptive forces like cyberthreats, which are multiplied by the growing volumes of unwieldy data across the organization.

All of these factors, taken together, drove us to develop the concept of intelligent data infrastructure, which I like to call “the three most competitive words in today’s market.” Why? Because intelligent data infrastructure is what enables us to turn a world of disruption into massive opportunity for every customer.

Let’s break down what we mean, word by word.

• Intelligent. In the broad sense, intelligence is the ability of a system to vary its state or action in response to varying situations, requirements, and past experience. In the context of data, we are talking about elements like artificial intelligence, software, and analytics—the ability to learn. With intelligence, data becomes the fuel for business growth and innovation. It’s about intelligently adapting to meet each moment.
• Data. This can be a tricky term, because so many people use it in so many different ways. But for us, data is simply information that can be used to make better decisions about everything from business strategy to how to make IT operate more elegantly and efficiently. That’s why intelligence is so critical—without it, data is merely an accumulation of facts and figures.
• Infrastructure. This is another term that gets bandied about a lot, and how we think about infrastructure has changed. With cloud, we need to think of infrastructure as everything that runs in our own data centers and the resources that are running our workloads in and across multiple clouds. Every organization needs to think of infrastructure holistically. It starts with a silo-free infrastructure, then harnesses observability and AI-powered data services to enable the best data management capabilities.

Now let’s put all of that information together in a meaningful way. Intelligent data infrastructure harnesses observability and AI to enable best data management actions everywhere, applied to silo-free infrastructure, so you can achieve your dynamic business priorities.

What do we mean when we say that NetApp is the intelligent data infrastructure company? We create a silo-free infrastructure, then harness observability and AI to enable best data management actions everywhere, so that our customers can achieve their dynamic business priorities. As the only enterprise-grade storage service natively embedded in the world’s largest clouds, our data storage powers any data across the biggest hyperscalers. NetApp® data services deliver active data management through superior data security, protection, governance, and sustainability. And our operational solutions enable adaptive operations across infrastructure, applications, and teams.

I’ve thrown quite a bit at you in this blog, which started rather modestly with me feeding the soil in my desert garden to enable strong plants to grow. But look at where we’ve ended up: with an intelligent data infrastructure that enables our customers to turn disruption into powerful opportunities. It’s all about rising to the moment. And we can’t wait to start teaming with you.

Explore the intelligent data infrastructure.