Reams have been written on digital business, but it may all boil down to one word: speed. Seconds, milliseconds, nanoseconds, etc. Specifically, the speed of data transport and analytics is of utmost importance. Do we bring the data to the compute, or vice versa?

Today, if a developer figures out a way to deliver some service faster and more conveniently, he or she could disrupt a whole industry.

“You could be killed any day by some of these startups who just build a mobile app, and all of a sudden they’ve gotten between you and the customer, and you’ve lost,” said Anthony Lye (pictured, left), senior vice president and general manager of the Cloud Business Unit at NetApp Inc.

More advanced ways of leveraging data are often at the core of these breakout startups and applications.

Lye and Jonsi Stefansson (pictured, right), chief technology officer and vice president of cloud at NetApp, spoke with Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Justin Warren (@jpwarren), chief analyst at PivotNine Pty Ltd., during the AWS re:Invent event in Las Vegas. They discussed the challenges of data gravity in multicloud and advanced analytics. (* Disclosure below.)

It’s the production data, ML devs

Established enterprises typically have much larger stores of data than do startups. But their legacy systems may not enable them to do anything mind-blowing with it. These enterprises are moving to cloud, largely in the belief that they’ll get more bang for their data assets there.

In hybrid cloud and multicloud, there’s an intensifying debate around whether data should move or not. It’s not easy, cheap or speedy, generally, to transport petabytes of data. Some say that a single, universal backup platform is the solution. Staying in place, it can dispense usable data copies in all environments. But there’s a catch.

“It’s extremely important to be developing on top of production data — specifically if you are doing machine and deep learning,” Stefansson said.

Those are the types of data analytics and artificial intelligence in all those better, faster apps.

Instead, a kind of high-speed freeway spanning multicloud is preferable, he added. This is the concept behind NetApps Data Fabric, whose architecture and services provide consistent capabilities across environments.

“You can take advantage of SageMaker in AWS, BitQuery in Google, whatever fits your needs. Then, if you want to store the results back on-premise, that’s what we enable. … It’s not enough to just move your application; data is the key for machine learning, data lakes, [etc.],” Stefansson concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS re:Invent event. (* Disclosure: NetApp Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither NetApp nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE