NetApp acquires CloudCheckr to accelerate customers digital transformation with more cloud, less cost

To say that cloud adoption has accelerated over the past almost two years is as good an example of understatement as I can imagine. A recent McKinsey study showed that there was five years’ worth of digital transformation crammed into just eight weeks in 2020^{https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/the-covid-19-recovery-will-be-digital-a-plan-for-the-first-90-days}. And that growth rate is predicted to continue, with Gartner forecasting that public cloud spending will increase by 23 percent this year alone^{https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2021-04-21-gartner-forecasts-worldwide-public-cloud-end-user-spending-to-grow-23-percent-in-2021}.

With these sharp increases in adoption combined with ever faster release cycles there come concerns around efficiency, cost, and security. Enterprises must optimize their cloud costs and secure their cloud configurations.

This is exactly why I am delighted to announce that we have again extended our Spot by NetApp platform with the acquisition of CloudCheckr. The deal has completed—the I’s are dotted and the T’s are crossed—and we are set to become a leader in the fast-growing FinOps and SecOps space, we now combine run time optimizations with comprehensive billing and usage analytics. Our recent announcement of Spot Security gets a huge boost with the CloudCheckr compliance and security services. I am confident that this acquisition will enable us to invent new ways to help customers accelerate their cloud adoption, continuously optimize costs, maintain security and compliance, to create the efficiencies they need to maintain competitive advantage in the digital world.

At NetApp we are customer first, we continually transform ourselves to better meet the needs of our partners and customers. Our acquisition of Spot complemented and extended our cloud storage solutions. Spot helps customers automate and optimize cloud infrastructure.

We harness advanced analytics and automation to deliver continuous optimization, we save customers up to 90% of their cloud cost while maintaining the applications SLA and SLO.

We partner deeply with all major cloud providers to ensure our partners and customers have choice and we’re co-engineering innovative solutions and embedding them directly into the services of each cloud provider to make it easier than ever to work with us. Uniquely Microsoft, Amazon and Google all sell and support our NetApp storage services.

We are now developing new ways to help our customers address their number one cloud challenge that comes with going fast: optimize cost and stay safe. Done both at run time and design time.

CloudCheckr adds value to our Spot portfolio, complementing Spot Eco, Ocean, Cloud Analyzer, and Spot PC capabilities with cloud billing analytics and cloud configuration management, monitoring, and assessments. Customers and partners will gain the visibility and intelligence they need to better monitor, understand, and continuously optimize their cloud costs, security, and usage at scale.

According to Statista, some of our customers’ biggest cloud security concerns are data loss/leakage and data privacy/confidentiality, followed by accidental exposure of credentials, and legal and regulatory compliance^{https://www.statista.com/statistics/1172265/biggest-cloud-security-concerns-in-2020/}. CloudCheckr will help us reduce business risk and deliver peace of mind to our customers by making it simpler to ensure that their configurations are secure and keeping their data safe and compliant.

CloudCheckr will lead our partner strategy for cloud, and we will use the CloudCheckr platform to build and extend distributor and partner businesses in both the private and public sectors.

I know that the benefits that CloudCheckr brings to the Spot by NetApp portfolio will have a truly transformational impact on our customers and partners and I invite you to reach out to us to see how we can help increase your company’s security and efficiency, while reducing your costs today.

Today we take our next big step forward. Today we deliver our commitment to customers and partners, put simply MORE CLOUD, LESS COST.