When it comes to hybrid cloud, “your business goes only as fast as the data infrastructure that supports the business,” NetApp CEO George Kurian said during a fireside chat with Rubrik co-founder and CEO Bipul Sinha as part of the Rubrik & NetApp Data Protection Summit. 

It's clear that the shift to cloud has accelerated. According to Gartner, more than 75% of midsize and large organizations have adopted an approach to IT that’s built on hybrid multicloud: on-premises cloud combined with more than one public cloud. 

The cloud is where enterprises are all going to land, said session moderator John Thompson, Microsoft chairman and a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. “There's also no question that the hybrid cloud model is, in fact, what many large organizations are contemplating.”

Underneath the covers, however, that hybrid cloud model doesn’t work well without a common operating system. Sure, there are dashboards, thousands of APIs, tools, and integrations that can help. But according to NetApp, hybrid cloud management isn’t a standardized approach with a single set of tools – it’s more of a discipline. That’s because critical capabilities are still maturing and emerging while new technologies, such as microservices orchestration, are still being integrated and improved upon.

NetApp doesn’t see a one-size-fits-all approach that’s simple and easy. “If you really want to get the flexibility and agility of cloud, you need a good hybrid data management platform, and that's where the NetApp-Rubrik partnership helps customers not just on-premises, but extend all of the benefits of an integrated architecture to the hybrid cloud and multicloud world,” Kurian said. 

Multicloud data control technology developer Rubrik began working with NetApp in 2019 when the partners unveiled Rubrik Cloud Data Management for NetApp StorageGRID, which bundles automated data lifecycle management through Rubrik’s control plane with StorageGRID as a cloud-scale object-based archive target.

The dynamic duo then rolled out another joint service the following month that integrated Rubrik’s cloud data management service with NetApp’s SnapDiff APIs to enable channel partners of both companies to easily attach Rubrik's data management offerings to NetApp's hybrid multicloud platform.

From a technology platform perspective, NetApp has been working to harmonize what used to be previously disparate silos into an integrated data management architecture. This is what the vendor calls data fabric and where its relationship with Rubrik is “such a good compliment,” Kurian said.

NetApp’s strength is in cloud services and software and data fabric is a key differentiator to the vendor’s hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), which its executives like to say stands for “hybrid cloud.” It makes on-premises HCI deployments look like just another public cloud region, essentially making this product composable infrastructure. It’s also the technology that allows NetApp customers to build a seamless multicloud experience because they can use it to discover, integrate, automate, optimize, and secure their data and applications.

Rubrik, for its part, is “complementing NetApp’s vision by delivering data recovery, compliance, and security, to deliver end-to-end data lifecycle management and business transformation,” Sinha said.

The company's Polaris Data Management Platform provides automated backup and recovery, protects against ransomware attacks via Polaris Radar for anomaly detection, and monitors risks using its Polaris Sonar data discovery and classification engine.  

Together, Rubrik and NetApp meet at the API layer to help customers through the entire journey of their data lifecycle via data mobility across data centers and clouds, and decrease time to market for new feature development, while also supporting data privacy regulations and compliance, Rubrik Field CTO David Siles said.