As we navigate through and adapt to the new normal , CIOs ought to consider building their own data fabrics . This gives companies the ability to take full control of their data regardless of where it resides – whether on premise or in the cloud or in an hybrid mode .

With the customer at the centre of all decisions , it becomes clear that companies need to be nimble and agile to stay in the business or ahead , considering that the current business conditions require faster and smarter decision-making capabilities while adopting a virtual digital workplace to meet their customer needs . We are seeing an increasing interest in cloud adoption as part of the accelerated Digital Transformation strategies of most enterprise companies . NetApp engagements with the major hyper-scalers is particularly important to support our customers in leveraging cloud storage resources to deliver the business outcomes they are seeking . As a cloud led , data-centric , hybrid multi-cloud software organisation , NetApp is helping customers to make the right choices , balancing the different clouds , to create the optimal environment to manage their data securely and thrive .

With the support of On-Command Insight for the on-prem infrastructure or On-Cloud Insight for cloudbased operation , NetApp is showing CIOs how they can optimise their environment on the storage layer , compute and the networking as well . Intelligent executive dashboards are created to provide real-time insights that identify the inefficiencies of the infrastructure , potential areas of failure , bottlenecks , etc .

With the adoption of hybrid multi-cloud architectures for enterprise customers , organisations everywhere are under tremendous pressure to

modernise their infrastructure and to deliver tangible business value around data intensive applications and workloads . As a result , enterprises are shifting from onpremises environments to using public cloud services , building private clouds , and moving from disk to flash in their data centres . These transformations open the door to huge potential , but they also introduce the challenge of increased IT complexity . Therefore , demand for simplicity and customisability will be the most sought requirement for enterprise storage technologies in the year ahead . NetApp offers modern , flexible technologies with the choice to use and consume those technologies so that our customers can keep pace with their evolving business models .

That said , the skills shortage in the Middle East and Africa ( MEA ) for data scientists and storage architects is pushing CIOs to consider IT managed services with clear SLAs to support the business outcomes . NetApp for example has many offerings that takes the burden away from customer so they can focus is on what matters most and leaves the data management element of the equation with the vendor as a service either provided directly or thru one of the established cloud service providers in the region .

NetApp is showing CIOs how they can optimise their environment on the storage layer , compute and the networking as well .

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Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 59 | Page 27

As we navigate through and adapt to the new normal , CIOs ought to consider building their own data fabrics . This gives companies the ability to take full control of their data regardless of where it resides – whether on premise or in the cloud or in an hybrid mode .