NetApp Inc. is taking another key step in its transition from a traditional storage company to one that’s more focused on managing data in the emerging landscape of multicloud environments.

At its NetApp Insight conference Tuesday, the company announced a number of new public and hybrid cloud products aimed at making data management easier.

The new products are designed to “empower customers to innovate in the cloud, in any form, to improve business outcomes in the face of a rapidly evolving technological landscape,” the company said. More important, they help to expand NetApp’s concept of a Data Fabric, which is an architecture that provides consistent capabilities across on-premises data centers and multiple cloud environments. The idea is to simplify data management.

For example, NetApp’s new NetApp Cloud Insights tool can be used to help with infrastructure monitoring and cost optimization in hybrid cloud environments. With Insights, NetApp reckons customers will be able to prevent up to 80 percent of cloud infrastructure issues from impacting their end users, while benefiting from a 90 percent reduction in mean time to resolve those issues. The product can also help customers to reduce their cloud infrastructure costs by an average of 33 percent, NetApp said.

The company is also targeting specific public cloud computing platforms with its new Azure NetApp Files and NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP products. The first one provides data management, security and protection for customers looking to move file-based workloads to Microsoft Corp.’s Azure cloud. It’s said to be optimized for rich and business-critical datasets and is being made available in limited preview form in Azure’s U.S. East and U.S. West 2 regions. As for NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, this is designed to bring high-availability failover capabilities to both Azure and Amazon Web Services Inc.’s cloud.

NetApp also pitched a new Cloud Tiering Service that can be used to optimize where on-premises data is stored when it’s sent to the cloud. Other new products include NetApp HCI, which is a hybrid cloud infrastructure platform designed to be used with the company’s SolidFire Element software. Together, the two are said to deliver “seamless integration between public and private cloud, now supporting SnapMirror to Cloud Volumes ONTAP.”

Next up was a new SaaS Backup for Office 365 service, which customers can use to back up and restore Microsoft Office 365 Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business data, either in a secondary cloud location or on-premises. The service is aimed at ensuring compliance with regulations such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation.

The last offering up was NetApp Data Availability Services, intended to help streamline backup and disaster recovery operations. The service works by moving data into the cloud and allowing reuse of that data for software development, testing, analytics and reporting.

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said NetApp’s new hybrid and public cloud capabilities were both timely and welcome in an age where storage itself is rapidly moving towards the cloud.

“That is what the sea exhaust that’s building modern applications wants to see, in order to be able to escape data gravity and to be able to comply with regulations,” Mueller said.

Following the announcements, NetApp Chief Executive Officer George Kurian (pictured) stopped by theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile event livestreaming studio. He said the new products revealed today would help NetApp to better do what its always done, which is to help customers make their businesses better with data. (* 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.)

“We used to do this strictly in the form of storage systems, but now we’ve built a much more robust portfolio of capabilities,” Kurian said. “[The idea is] to enable customers to use our technology wherever their data sits, whether it’s at the edge of the enterprise or in the heart of the biggest cloud providers.”

Here’s Kurian’s full interview:

Photo: SiliconANGLE