While moving to the cloud seems to be the natural path for many workloads and enterprise applications, there is still some resistance to be overcome. This is the case with some storage administrators, who are responsible for one of the most important business assets – data – and fear that a change could compromise performance, availability and security.

Breaking down this resistance is the goal of some recent announcements by Amazon Web Services Inc., such as the general availability of Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. AWS closed a deal with NetApp Inc. to run its full ONTAP stack natively in the cloud as a managed service.

“It allows customers to quickly move from like to like, so they can move from on-prem what they’re using in terms of the storage services, the processes they use to administer the data and manage the data straight onto AWS, without any conversion, without any change to their application,” said Wayne Duso (pictured), vice president of engineering at AWS. “So storage administrators can be really confident that they can move. Application administrators know it will work as well, if not better, with the cloud.”

Duso spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the AWS Storage Day event. They discussed the concerns of storage administrators around moving to the cloud, as well as how AWS matches the needs of a customer’s workload and applications. (* Disclosure below.)

Building a service versus building a box

Once businesses are on the cloud, they have the ability, through all service integrations, to optimize cost, modernize and improve on the applications, workloads and datasets that they have brought into a flywheel effect, according to Duso.

“Cost optimization allows you to reinvest; reinvesting allows you to be more agile, more innovative, which again, returns a value to your business and value to your customers,” he explained.

The infrastructure restrictions that exist in storage boxes do not apply to the cloud, where it is possible, for example, to stand up a file system in seconds, as well as grow and shrink it whenever necessary. In addition, the agility of storage and data services is designed to match the innovation needs of customers, according to Duso.

“Each of the surfaces that we have in object block file, movement services, data services, each of them provides very specific customer value and each are deeply integrated with the rest of AWS so that when you need object services, you start using them. The integrations come along with you,” Duso stated.

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE