INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Cloud
Making the most of data
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NetApp, the data authority
for hybrid cloud, believes
astute use of data can make
companies more competitive.
Intelligent CIO speaks to Fadi
Kanafani, Managing Director,
Middle East, Africa and
Pakistan, NetApp, about the
best ways of doing this.
How can enterprises ensure that
data becomes the lifeblood of their
Digital Transformation?
Today there are so many industries that
revolve around data. Data can allow
enterprises to be more competitive, more
agile to differentiate their offering to
the market, and to be faster to introduce
products. So what you do with data
will determine your existence in a very
competitive world that is very progressive,
very dynamic and changing every day
if you’re not able to make use of the
data points that are around you, you will
eventually be put on a sideline.
How can CIOs extract value from
their data?
First of all they need to actually have a data
strategy. To start with you need to look at
classifying your data. What is important?
What is less important? What can you keep
on premise? What can you put on the cloud?
So this is an engagement strategy that
enterprises need to venture into to define
what is best suited for them. And with
NetApp from the outside we play the
experts around data management to help
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enterprises on their journey and determine
for them what best suits them along the
way and then propose the right architecture
to address their overall objectives and allow
them to meet their strategy.
Are we going to get to a stage where
we’ve got too much data?
Yes. There will be lots of data but the key is
to ask ‘now I have that Big Data what do I
do with it?’ And that’s why we partner with
ecosystem partners in the field to develop
the data lakes. Where we can also employ
solutions like on-tap AI from NetApp.
have cloud workloads. This ensures that our
customers’ CIOs get peace of mind.
And then what we also do for security to
ensure that their services are always up
and always online, is if they adopt a multi-
cloud strategy we would work with them to
have a copy in another cloud, hyperscale or
a local provider, whereby if one fails their
data is always available. In a split second
your data is back up serving your customers
and your requirements. n
Fadi Kanafani, Managing Director, Middle
East, Africa and Pakistan, NetApp
That would allow you to do graphical
processing of that data which is on a GDU
basis, we’ve partnered with Nvidia to help
our customers make use of that data. You
have to decide what is important data, what
is relevant data, and what is data you can
just discard. And through having the right
foundation for it, with the right analytics
around it, you can make sure you are making
the best out of the data that you have.
How can CIOs ensure that their data
is secure?
There are a lot of companies that talk
about security and today it has become
vital we keep hearing about the loss
of millions and billions of dollars when
something gets hacked. When we look at
what we offer here at NetApp we ensure
that data gets encrypted – not while it is in
the server, even over wire, even in the cloud.
So even if there is a breach to a particular
cloud, NetApp data is always encrypted and
it cannot be compromised.
What we do is we encrypt it on a hardware
level. It transfers the wire encrypted and
lands in the cloud encrypted where we
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