Many IT teams are finding that traditional storage is slowing down digital initiatives rather than enabling them. Recent research from Enterprise Strategy Group (now Omdia) found that 69% of IT leaders say infrastructure complexity is slowing IT operations and digital initiatives, and 68% call out storage as a major pain point.

NetApp Keystone is designed to help you rethink how you consume storage so you can focus more on projects and less on plumbing:

• Reduces day-to-day management overhead – With a managed, subscription-based model, your team spends less time on backups, patches, and troubleshooting, and more time on higher-value work. Many organizations report that this shift helps accelerate IT initiatives and even improves IT staff retention.
• Aligns costs with usage – Instead of large, upfront capex, you pay only for the capacity you actually use. This helps mitigate financial risk, avoid overprovisioning, and free up budget for other priorities such as AI or new applications.
• Supports modern workloads – Keystone is built for hybrid multicloud environments and demanding workloads. It offers SLA-backed performance and up to five nines (99.999%) availability, so storage becomes a stable foundation for initiatives like AI, cyberresilience, and cloud migration.
• Simplifies a fragmented storage landscape – Instead of managing multiple silos, Keystone provides a unified way to deploy, manage, and pay for storage across on-premises, public cloud, and edge locations.

In short, Keystone helps you reimagine storage from a capital asset that’s hard to change into an on-demand service that adapts as your business and workloads evolve.

Keystone is designed to give you a cloud-like experience for storage, but on your terms—on-premises, in the cloud, or both.

Key aspects of the model include:

• Single subscription across environments – Keystone uses one subscription to cover file, block, and object storage across on-premises, public cloud, and edge locations. This helps reduce contract complexity and simplifies billing.
• Unified management – A single control plane provides centralized visibility and self-service management for all Keystone storage. This helps eliminate silos and reduces operational complexity.
• Flexible capacity and performance – You can scale capacity up or down by up to 25% annually and adjust committed capacity each year. This is particularly useful when future needs are uncertain, for example with AI workloads that may drive rapid data growth.
• On-premises control with cloud economics – Keystone follows a pay-as-you-go, Opex-based model, but infrastructure can run in your own data centers so you retain full control of data and meet regulatory requirements in sectors like financial services, healthcare, education, and government.
• Native multicloud integration – NetApp is the only storage vendor with first-party services on all three major clouds: AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Keystone takes advantage of this to enable consistent data services and seamless data mobility across your hybrid cloud.

Compared with many other STaaS offerings, Keystone is built to act as a unifying layer across your entire hybrid multicloud environment, not just a capacity-on-demand option in a single location.

Keystone is structured to reduce both operational and financial risk while strengthening cyber resilience and optimizing cost.

Risk and resilience

• SLA-backed performance and availability – Keystone includes service-level agreements for performance and offers up to 99.999% availability, giving you predictable service levels for critical workloads.
• Built-in cyber resilience – All NetApp security and resilience capabilities are included, such as AI-powered ransomware detection and immutable data copies. There is also an optional Ransomware Recovery Guarantee for data restoration, adding another layer of assurance.
• Faster time to value – The ability to deploy new capacity in days instead of months helps reduce project risk and keeps infrastructure aligned with business timelines.

Financial and cost optimization

• Pay only for what you use – The consumption-based model means you avoid overbuying hardware, data center space, power, and cooling. This helps reduce overall IT risk and can free up budget for other initiatives.
• Predictable Opex model – Keystone converts “lumpy” capex into more predictable operating expense aligned to actual usage, which can make budgeting and forecasting easier.
• Automated tiering to lower-cost storage – Keystone automatically moves cold or infrequently accessed data to more cost-effective tiers, such as on-premises object storage or public cloud. According to NetApp, this can deliver up to 50% total cost of ownership (TCO) reduction without manual intervention.

Taken together, these capabilities help you reshape your storage strategy so that it actively reduces risk and cost, while still supporting demanding, data-intensive workloads.