Last week, Rubrik was thrilled to be a sapphire sponsor at  the NetApp Insight Conference, where we had the opportunity to speak firsthand with our customers, give a sneak peek of our upcoming NetApp SnapDiff integration, and highlight our strategic partnership with NetApp. Attending Insight also provided significant, well, insights into what’s top of mind for IT organizations and the biggest challenges enterprises face with data protection.

To help navigate the sea of information, we’ve put together a list of the biggest trends and observations from Insight: 

1. Everyone is thinking about multi-cloud.

Data is everywhere. As data mobility becomes a reality, so does the concept of data in multiple clouds. This multi-cloud operations paradigm leads to complex management and potential compliance violations.

At Insight, it became clear when speaking to customers that they need simplification of infrastructure and operations across all environments, especially as data becomes increasingly fragmented. This strategy complements Rubrik’s founding vision to simplify data management and track and store data where it makes the most sense.

2. Customers are looking for modern data protection and control.

Many IT orgs today are faced with the problem of clunky, legacy data protection systems with little ROI. On top of this, they aren’t even sure where all the copies of their data reside. It’s common for production data to be copied for test/dev or additional backup copies, either on-prem or in the cloud. As more copies are created, the ability to track them becomes increasingly difficult.

At the Rubrik booth, we had the opportunity to speak with many folks who had great confidence in NetApp’s products and partner ecosystem. In one conversation, a NetApp customer explained that a vendor must be a strategic partner with NetApp and offer key integrations to fit with his IT organization’s environment. It was a great opportunity to dive into Rubrik’s new NetApp capabilities and how, together, the two can optimize data lifecycle management. We went through a demo of Rubrik, including our policy-driven automation and the ability to store ONTAP data where it makes the most sense (StorageGRID for him) with Rubrik Direct Archive. It’s always great to see the light bulb go off right when a person realizes how much time and effort Rubrik can bring to their organization.

3. Companies consider data a product.

If you have a moment, please watch the presentation from Kate Swanborg (SVP, Technology Communications and Strategic Alliances at Dreamworks Animation) during the Insight Keynote. In her talk, she stated that Dreamworks Animation produces data (not movies) since their product is 100% digital, meaning they must store massive amounts of data. This “data explosion” trend will only continue, bringing the next wave of challenges, data sprawl, and classification. As we store more data, the ability to both quickly find data as well as tag it for compliance will become a key trend in our industry. Think of data classification as the ability to tag data in many different ways to better organize all of the unstructured mess that may pile up in your data center. This concept of data as a product will continue to increase. The data inside an organization will be the most important asset and as the data grows, so does the need for protection, compliance, and classification.

Finally, here’s a quick recap Rubrik’s technical presentation at NetApp Insight. We recently announced our first-to-market integration with NetApp SnapDiff APIs across on-premises and cloud environments. This integration builds upon last month’s announcement of the Rubrik and StorageGRID integration. These joint solutions bring a tremendous amount of value to large ONTAP NAS customers looking for a modern, efficient way to protect file shares without the legacy cruft of NDMP. NetApp customers will be able to increase the speed of their backups by 10x while at the same time reducing the overhead of the production ONTAP system. As part of the presentation, Analog Devices–a joint NetApp and Rubrik customer–presented their challenges and how this integration has made their operations simpler and more reliable.

Want to know more about Rubrik and its partner ecosystem? Please consider joining us at our first ever customer conference, Rubrik Forward. We look forward to seeing you there!