Capturing big data is easy. What's difficult is to corral, tag, govern, and utilize it. NetApp, a hybrid cloud provider, sees cloud automation as a practice that enables IT, developers, and teams to develop, modify, and disassemble resources automatically on the cloud. Cloud computing provides services whenever it is required. Yet, you need support to utilize these resources to further test, identify, and take them down when the requirement is no longer needed. Completing the process requires a lot of manual effort and is time-consuming. This is when cloud automation intervenes.

Many companies are accelerating their cloud plans right now, and most say that their cloud usage will exceed prior estimates due to the new demands posed by the global pandemic. Cloud computing is becoming a must-have resource, especially for young tech companies. And most of them are migrating to Amazon, Google, or Azure, lured by seemingly attractive offers. What many companies don't realize is how dramatically the cloud spend can increase given that those expenses aren't charged up-front. Organizations are often unaware of how easy it is to become locked into service at hard-to-understand prices, says Laurent Gil, co-founder and Chief Product Officer at CAST AI. "Vendor lock-in starts whenever you start using a service in a way that serves the purpose of the cloud provider," he explains.

The dictates of big data--its inner manipulations and trends--have defined the very form of the data ecosystem since the inception of these technologies nearly a decade ago. It's become entrenched in the most meaningful dimensions of data management, implicit to all but its most mundane practices, and indistinguishable from almost any type of data leveraged for competitive advantage. As such, current momentum in the big data space isn't centered on devising new expressions of its capabilities, but rather on converging them to actualize the long sought, rarely realized, time honored IT ideal of what Cambridge Semantics CTO Sean Martin termed "interoperability. And, the more the data starts to support that, the more interesting that gets, too." The grand vision of interoperability involves the capacity to readily interchange enterprise systems and resources as needed to maximize business productivity without technological restrictions.