IT teams are reexamining storage because traditional, capex-heavy approaches are struggling to keep up with today’s demands—especially AI, cyber-resilience, and cloud initiatives.

Recent research from Enterprise Strategy Group (now Omdia) highlights the scale of the problem:

• 69% of IT leaders say IT infrastructure complexity is slowing down operations and digital initiatives.
• 68% specifically call out storage as a major pain point.

Common issues with legacy storage environments include:

• Fragmented storage silos that raise operational complexity and costs.
• Difficulty ensuring the right performance and tiering as workloads evolve.
• Challenges integrating storage with broader IT operations and tooling.
• Limited visibility into future capacity needs, especially for AI and data-heavy applications.
• Financial risk from overinvesting (and underutilizing) or underinvesting (and having to upgrade early).

Because of these pressures, the traditional large up-front capex approach is becoming less practical. Many organizations don’t have the budget or skills to continuously refresh and redesign storage for every new wave of workloads.

That’s why more teams are turning to Storage as a Service (STaaS) models like NetApp Keystone, which let them consume storage on a pay-as-you-go, Opex-based basis while keeping data on premises or in their preferred clouds. This model helps align costs with actual usage, reduce complexity, and support modernization without a big one-time investment.

NetApp Keystone is designed to reimagine how enterprises deploy, manage, and pay for storage by giving a cloud-like experience across hybrid multicloud environments.

Key differentiators include:

1. Single subscription across hybrid multicloud

• One subscription spans file, block, and object storage.
• Covers on-premises, public cloud, and edge locations.
• A single management control plane eliminates storage silos and simplifies operations, billing, and contracts.

2. Flexible capacity and performance

• Scale capacity up or down by up to 25% annually, aligning with changing needs.
• Shift workloads between on-premises and cloud as requirements evolve.
• Annual adjustments to committed capacity help avoid overprovisioning and long-term lock-in.

3. Built-in cyber resilience and data protection

• Includes NetApp’s security and cyber-resilience capabilities as part of the service.
• AI-powered ransomware detection and immutable data copies help protect critical data.
• Optional Ransomware Recovery Guarantee supports data restoration commitments.

4. Automated tiering and cost control

• Automatically moves cold or infrequently accessed data to lower-cost tiers (on-premises object or public cloud).
• According to NetApp, this can reduce total cost of ownership by up to 50% without manual intervention.

5. Native multicloud integration

• NetApp is the only storage vendor with first-party services integrated into all three major public clouds: AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
• This enables consistent data services and seamless mobility across the hybrid cloud.
• Helps unify procurement, contracts, and operations across on-prem and cloud environments.

6. SLA-backed performance and availability

• Service-level agreements for performance and availability, with up to five nines availability.
• Designed to reduce operational risk and give predictable service levels for critical workloads.

Together, these capabilities make Keystone more than capacity on demand; it acts as a platform to reshape how organizations run storage across their entire hybrid multicloud footprint.

Organizations adopting on-premises STaaS models like NetApp Keystone are seeing a mix of operational and financial benefits, backed by independent research from Enterprise Strategy Group (now Omdia).

1. Freeing up IT time and improving staff experience

• The most frequently cited benefit—reported by more than half of respondents—is that consumption-based models free IT personnel from low-value tasks.
• Teams spend less time on backups, updates, patches, and troubleshooting, and more time on initiatives that support the business.
• Many organizations also note improved IT staff experience and better retention, because day-to-day work is less focused on “keeping the lights on.”

2. Lower financial and operational risk

• Paying only for the hardware actually used helps control storage costs and reduce waste on unused capacity, data center space, power, and cooling.
• Opex-based subscription avoids large up-front capex and aligns spend with usage over time.
• Keystone’s ability to scale on demand and deploy new capacity in days instead of months helps organizations respond to new workloads without lengthy procurement cycles.

3. Support for key initiatives like AI and cloud

• By reducing complexity and speeding deployment, Keystone helps organizations move faster on AI, cloud migration, and cyber-resilience projects.
• Native integration with AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure means data services are consistent across environments, which simplifies hybrid and multicloud strategies.

4. Cost optimization through automated tiering

• Automated movement of cold data to lower-cost tiers keeps high-performance storage focused on active workloads.
• NetApp reports that this can drive up to 50% TCO reduction in some scenarios, without requiring manual data placement decisions.

When you put this together, Keystone helps organizations not just modernize storage, but rethink how storage supports long-term IT and business goals—shifting from infrastructure upkeep to delivering higher-value outcomes across the hybrid cloud.