CIO opinion
CIO OPINION
Making the most of data
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. classifying your data. What is important?
What is less important? What can you keep
on premise? What can you put on the cloud?
How can enterprises ensure that
data becomes the lifeblood of their
Digital Transformation? Are we going to get to a stage where
we’ve got too much data?
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
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
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.
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.
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.
Fadi Kanafani, Managing Director, Middle
East, Africa and Pakistan, NetApp
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
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
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INTELLIGENTCIO
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