A lot of companies are biting their nails thinking they’re not doing enough to modernize through cloud computing. They’re grasping at everything with cloud-infrastructure, cloud-based, cloud-service, cloud-native on the label. They want to be all-in on cloud, all the time. For them, David Hitz (pictured), founder and executive vice president of NetApp Inc., has a question: “What’s your problem?”

Different business problems take different solutions, and — shocker — the right one might not always be a 24-7 IV drip of maximum-strength cloud, according to Hitz.

To be sure, there are some demanding use cases that the public cloud chomps up for good reason. Want to develop a scraping-edge, innovative application with artificial intelligence for facial recognition, sentiment analysis, and online-shopping recommendations in one?”I guarantee you the team working in the public cloud will beat the on-premises team hands-down every time,” Hitz said.

But ask a lot of these cloud-obsessed businesses what they need, and often it’s just greater speed to drive some moderate innovation. For that, there are various ways to modernize, and a bunch of “cloudy” things they can do without signing their souls over to Amazon Web Services Inc., according to Hitz.

Hitz spoke with Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during this week’s NetApp Insight event in Las Vegas. They discussed how NetApp has cloudified its portfolio and the diverse tricks its Data Fabric architecture can do for users. (* Disclosure below.)

Eau de cloud

NetApp leaned into cloud when other storage companies saw it as a threat. It’s been incorporating cloud-based solutions into its storage platform for some time. However, the first release of NetApp’s Cloud Volumes ONTAP didn’t quite hit it out of the park, according to Hitz. There were some engineering tweaks, but it just didn’t smell cloudy.

Fresh insight from the head of NetApp’s cloud business unit, Anthony Lye, moved the ball forward and is making NetApp a key piece in many customers’ hybrid-cloud efforts. “If you look at the work we’re doing now, it’s like, OK, here’s a restful [application program interface], here’s the JSON Schema, and into Azure resource manager. Like, that’s cloudy,” Hitz said.

NetApp is advising customers on how they too can smell cloudier with technologies like data-management for hybrid cloud.

“Our Data Fabric strategy is not to tell customers what to do,” Hitz said. Instead, NetApp wants those customers hasty to go all-in on cloud to slow down, take a breath, and look at how Data Fabric might get them the outcomes they need for less trouble.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the NetApp Insight event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for NetApp Insight. Neither NetApp Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE