Sovereign storage is becoming an architectural and operational consideration for European enterprises as they invest in AI, modernization and cyber resilience.

Sovereignty now covers much more than where data is physically stored. Customers want to know who operates and manages it, where support is based and what telemetry is collected, according to Willem Hendrickx (pictured), senior vice president and general manager of EMEA and LATAM at NetApp.

“What [our customers] really want is a cloud-like experience but having control of their data,” he said. “Sovereignty is not only a legal discussion, but it’s actually an architectural design and an operational decision more than anything else.”

Hendrickx spoke with theCUBE Research’s Christophe Bertrand and co-host Rebecca Knight at NetApp INSIGHT, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed sovereign storage, neoclouds and cyber resilience in Europe. (* Disclosure below.)

Sovereign storage and the business case for controlled data

Many customers still buy capital equipment on five-year cycles because they know what their demand will be. A growing number need infrastructure that follows the business instead, with predictable cost, availability, performance and growth, Hendrickx explained. NetApp’s new Keystone Sovereign service gives qualified European customers data sovereignty controls, and local partners can build it into their own sovereign offerings.

“There’s sometimes a little bit of a thinking that as a service is more like a payment model,” Hendrickx said. “It’s way more than that. It’s really a business decision.”

Enterprises face a different AI problem than the neoclouds building GPU gigafactories across Europe. Most have decades of data spread across countries and clouds. NetApp is pitching its Novus architecture and wider data infrastructure as the way to make that data AI-ready, according to Hendrickx.

“If you don’t do that, you see a lot of AI pilots, but they never get in production,” he said. “And you can only do that when you really make everything AI-ready.”

Fragmentation makes the problem worse. AI, on-premises systems, software as a service and cloud often run as separate operating models with separate teams, which leaves AI projects stranded on islands, Hendrickx noted. NetApp’s Keystone storage-as-a-service platform can help unify those operating models and shift the focus toward business outcomes, according to Hendrickx.

“I really believe you’re going to have more grip on your business because you’re going to reduce cost and you’re going to focus on business outcomes and you’re going to drive innovation,” he said. “We need to be way more innovative than we have been.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of NetApp INSIGHT:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for NetApp INSIGHT. Neither NetApp, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE