Azure NetApp Files vs NetApp Cloud Insights comparison

Azure NetApp Files and NetApp Cloud Insights are both solutions in the Cloud Migration category. Azure NetApp Files is ranked #8 with an average rating of 7.3, while NetApp Cloud Insights is ranked #11 with an average rating of 8.8. Azure NetApp Files holds a 14.6% mindshare in CM, compared to NetApp Cloud Insights’s 2.7% mindshare. Additionally, 88% of Azure NetApp Files users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of NetApp Cloud Insights users who would recommend it.

Azure NetApp Files

Read 17 Azure NetApp Files reviews

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1,025 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

NetApp Cloud Insights

Read 13 NetApp Cloud Insights reviews

1,203 Views
265 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Azure NetApp Files

NetApp Cloud Insights

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Azure NetApp Files and NetApp Cloud Insights both compete in cloud storage and analytics, offering unique features tailored to enterprise needs. Azure NetApp Files often stands out for its speed and ease of integration with the Azure ecosystem, while NetApp Cloud Insights gains an edge with advanced analytics and visibility capabilities in multi-vendor environments.

Features: Azure NetApp Files provides ultra-fast SQL backups and restores, seamless integration with the Azure ecosystem, and SnapMirror for enhanced data replication and protection. Its ease of provisioning further simplifies its deployment for enterprises. NetApp Cloud Insights excels in resource utilization visibility, advanced analytics for identifying multi-tiered issues, and efficient inventory of resources, offering valuable insights into infrastructure performance.

Room for Improvement: Azure NetApp Files could improve its backup functionalities and customer support, enhance cost-effectiveness, and simplify deployment processes. Users seek more paired regions for data replication and reduced configuration complexities. NetApp Cloud Insights can advance its reporting features and user guidance, especially for complex datasets, and provide more intuitive solutions directly out-of-the-box.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Azure NetApp Files benefits from robust deployment within the Azure ecosystem, offering high-quality technical support through Microsoft and NetApp. NetApp Cloud Insights, supporting diverse hybrid and on-premises solutions, also provides excellent customer service despite its complexity requiring strategic navigation through support channels.

Pricing and ROI: Azure NetApp Files is considered a premium offering, with higher costs justified by performance scalability and potential cost savings through operational efficiency. It appeals to dynamic businesses with flexible storage requirements. NetApp Cloud Insights is seen as affordable compared to other cloud solutions, despite a complex licensing model. It enables cost savings through optimal infrastructure use and provides significant ROI by easing deployment and minimizing downtime.

To learn more, read our detailed Azure NetApp Files vs. NetApp Cloud Insights Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Azure NetApp Files vs. NetApp Cloud Insights

July 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Azure NetApp Files

Ranking in Cloud Migration

8th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Storage (8th), Public Cloud Storage Services (10th)

NetApp Cloud Insights

Ranking in Cloud Migration

11th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Infrastructure Monitoring (34th), Cloud Monitoring Software (24th)

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Cloud Migration category, the mindshare of Azure NetApp Files is 14.6%, down from 17.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp Cloud Insights is 2.7%, up from 1.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Migration

Featured Reviews

AjayKumar13

Cloud/Data/Database Manager at a government with 10,001+ employees

Fast, reliable, and helps meet our SLAs

The most valuable feature is that the sixty-terabyte database snapshot can be done in less than two to three minutes. It is faster. It is quicker. It is reliable. You don't need to take the snapshot. Snapshots are compressed. It doesn't take storage from the back end. It takes three minutes to do sixty terabytes of the database. You don't have to go to the tape and store it outside, which takes hours and hours. It also uses a lot less of the storage. It's very easy to restore or copy the snapshots to other locations for disaster recovery. There are a lot of benefits. In terms of the snapshot's rapid restore capability, we were testing the load of performance testing, and we needed to rebuild the DR site. If I need to rebuild the DR for a standby database, it takes sixty terabytes to copy onto the another site, which will take at least a day. Now, the snapshot is easy. We just copy the snapshots, and then we do the cross-region application. The snapshots came along with that, and that's where we were able to build the DR site within a few hours rather than days. All together, instead of a four-day process, instead of a day.

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Punit Waghela

Technical Specialist at Softcell Technologies Limited

Reduces troubleshooting time and improves operational efficiency through a single console

NetApp technology, specifically NetApp Cloud Insights, has significantly impacted the way my customers do business. One customer had multiple components, such as a VMware environment, Cisco switches, NetApp storage, and backup tools. Previously, the customer had to monitor all these tools individually each morning by logging into every console to check for errors or performance issues. It used to take them about 1 or 2 hours, but after we installed NetApp Cloud Insights, the time spent was reduced to just 5 minutes with a single console where they could monitor everything. The customer can integrate their VMware servers, Cisco switches, and storage with NetApp Cloud Insights to quickly identify any problems and resolve issues efficiently, demonstrating a reduction in complexity and monitoring time. The values that NetApp Cloud Insights delivers to my customers are evident in real examples, such as an application team running their application on a single VM connected through a switch and storage. When they experience a performance issue, the VMware team needs to identify the source of the slowness, whether it's from the server, switch, or storage, which requires a time-consuming investigation of each component. Without NetApp Cloud Insights, this process is slow and stressful for both the application team and the VMware team, but with the tool, a single click allows the customer to pinpoint the issue directly, improving response times to performance problems immensely. The evolving cybersecurity landscape and the proliferation of AI highly influence my customers' technology decisions, as having NetApp storage in their environment allows them to detect ransomware attacks effectively. NetApp guarantees data recovery in case of such attacks, and here, NetApp Cloud Insights plays a crucial role; it can identify where a ransomware attack originates, allowing the IT team to respond rapidly, such as disconnecting affected devices to mitigate the damage, especially crucial when multiple users are involved.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"It is faster. It is quicker. It is reliable."

"You can change it non-disruptively. You can increase the size and decrease the size online, which is a huge benefit compared to Azure disks. It just works seamlessly. You don't need to stop the instances."

"This solution definitely makes us more efficient in being able to provide storage quickly to our customers in the Azure Cloud."

"It has saved a lot of time. Because in the older, conventional hardware system, they need to raise a ticket to go to storage engineering, then storage engineering would increased the size. Now, it's dynamic. You don't have to do anything. This improved the time by more than 50 percent."

"We use Azure NetApp Files mainly for backup."

"One aspect of Azure NetApp Files that I truly appreciate is its remarkable performance capabilities."

"I think the easiest part is, when you do a comparison, it is the throughput versus the cost. And it's much easier to set up."

"Azure NetApp Files has been stable."

More Azure NetApp Files pros

"Its ability to quickly inventory our resources, figure out interdependencies across them, and assemble a topology of your environment is brilliant. There is a price associated with it. Whenever you target a NetApp environment, it is included in the price but whenever you want to add different vendors, like VMware and Cisco, the price greatly spikes. Inventorization helps us a lot to visualize the environment."

"NetApp Cloud Insights helps reduce the time spent on problem resolution by up to 50% for my customers, making their operations significantly more efficient and productive, which is a perfect outcome."

"Cloud Secure is definitely the most valuable feature and being able to see file level activity. It gives real-time alerting on possible ransomware attacks and provides file security review. It helps us to see if something abnormal is happening on the system before it's too late."

"All our production clusters are in Cloud Insight. It provides a single pane of glass, giving us visibility into the environment, which allows us to understand if any issues are going on across any of our clusters."

"It is good for giving an overview of the systems and for tracking long-term trends. It is handy for root cause analysis, e.g. it can eliminate whether storage is the cause of an issue."

"The solution is 98 percent stable."

"The visibility and assistance with security vulnerabilities are valuable."

More NetApp Cloud Insights pros

Cons

"The solution needs to improve it's ABS environment."

"Azure NetApp Files could improve by being more diverse to integrate better with other solutions, such as Splunk and the on-premise version. There are some use cases that are not covered natively by Azure. It is not the best solution because it is not external from the cloud which for me is the best type of solution."

"The initial setup was not straightforward. We had help from the NetApp team."

"Its pricing can be better."

"We would like to have backup functionality built-in so that we don't run into the issue where the replication process makes a copy of the corrupted data."

"I would like to see multi-zone redundancy so that I don't have to worry about it. I just back up my data to that one SMB share and I know that it's replicated to a different region."

"The deployment process is somewhat complex compared to other storage solutions."

"The main area for improvement is in the support ticket system. Since it's a SaaS platform, support tickets are managed by Microsoft or NetApp backend. This can sometimes lead to cross-functional challenges for organizations."

More Azure NetApp Files cons

"When I did need support because I was having problems with the solution, the first or the second line just didn't understand it. They were providing this only on a software as a service basis. So, they were asking all the wrong questions."

"Cloud Insights could offer more detail when we drill down into the Azure environment."

"The support is not very quick."

"The IP-based monitoring could be added in a future release."

"Their pricing model needs improvement."

"Ease of reporting is one thing that they're trying to tackle. If you have a specific set of data you want from Cloud Insights, you can ask NetApp to help you build the reports from the ground up. The dashboards are intuitive, but finding the report you want is sometimes a challenge. If you don't have the report already loaded, pulling it in and letting it build its data can be cumbersome."

"In a perfect world we would have something built, right out-of-the-box, that can identify what we call "noise," and reduce the amount of data. You're presented with so much data when you first start the data collectors. For example, it brings back a lot of change rates that happen just because of standard computing, like profile changes and that sort of thing. Being able to identify things like that and categorize them and strip it down—and it probably can do that, I just haven't gotten there yet—would be very beneficial."

"Even though I work with NetApp, it still takes time for me to navigate and find components, so new customers might require considerable hands-on experience to efficiently use the console, indicating that it could be more user-friendly."

More NetApp Cloud Insights cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten."

"The performance has improved by about 30 percent."

"The price of Azure NetApp Files could be better."

"NetApp is a premium offering, so it's not a cheap product, but it is well-priced. It combines a couple of properties which customers like us are willing to pay. Could it be cheaper? Yes, but if you combine fully supported, fully managed, easily provisioned, scalable, and quick all in one product, it's a good selling point. You can ask a lot of money for all these. If you have a use case like we do, it's a perfect match. It's like the Porsche of storage solutions in the cloud. It is totally worth the cost."

"The solution’s combination of the ease of use, simplicity, and reduction in IT management versus the cost has helped a lot. It is very fast to deploy. It's very easy to maintain. You don't have to do a lot in the cloud to maintain this thing, so it gives good performance. It's fast to deploy, easy to maintain, and it gives a better performance. These are the most basic three criteria for any application. This saves cost because the manpower you need to deploy is going down. You're getting better performance and not buying new resources. You have resources available in the cloud. It's just a couple of clicks, then you're good to go."

"Its price is double the price of the premium disks, which is the main reason why customers don't go for this solution in the end."

"Our pricing has not been determined because we are still waiting on additional features."

"The licensing fees for this solution vary, ranging from a single shelf to a full suite."

More Azure NetApp Files pricing and cost advice

"The licensing model could be improved. We love that you can use it for free for looking at NetApp products. You only need licenses to look at non-NetApp products, but as soon as you do that, you start utilizing licenses that actually would have been free in the public. So, there is a bit of an anomaly in the licensing model."

"The solution is expensive."

"The licensing is complex. The calculation depends on what you're ingesting. A terabyte of one product is not a terabyte of another product. Virtual machines don't equate so easily. It's all about the end-use managed units and having an easy place to reference how far those units go."

"We are billed based on management units, so we can purchase units based on six months, twelve months, twenty-four months, or thirty-six months upfront or pay as you go depending on our requirements."

"The solution's pricing is based on the device you purchase and includes support services."

"Be aware of the capacity licensing and understand how that works, because it is based on capacity. Getting an understanding of that is the biggest thing."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

13%

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

34%

Computer Software Company

21%

Financial Services Firm

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

How does Azure NetApp Files compare to NetApp ONTAP?

Azure NetApp Files is a Microsoft Azure file storage service built on NetApp technology. The platform combines the file capabilities of Azure and NetApp to move critical file-based applications to ...

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What do you like most about Azure NetApp Files?

The availability is good, meaning downtime or network issues rarely occur. The system also offers flexibility, allowing for increases in data volume, IOPS, and other capabilities without requiring ...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure NetApp Files?

It is expensive, especially with NetApp Ultra Storage.

See all answers

What do you like most about NetApp Cloud Insights?

NetApp Cloud Insights helps with login monitoring and troubleshooting. Previously, if we had performance concerns or needed to interface with other groups and their products, a task that should req...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetApp Cloud Insights?

The licensing is complex. The calculation depends on what you're ingesting. A terabyte of one product is not a terabyte of another product. Virtual machines don't equate so easily. It's all about t...

See all answers

What needs improvement with NetApp Cloud Insights?

In my opinion, one area where NetApp Cloud Insights could be improved for the next release is the console, which I find a bit complex. Even though I work with NetApp, it still takes time for me to ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Microsoft Azure File Storage vs Azure NetApp Files

Compared 34% of the time

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP vs Azure NetApp Files

Compared 28% of the time

Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) vs Azure NetApp Files

Compared 8% of the time

Nasuni vs Azure NetApp Files

Compared 7% of the time

Amazon FSx vs Azure NetApp Files

Compared 6% of the time

More Azure NetApp Files Competitors

Dell CloudIQ vs NetApp Cloud Insights

Compared 69% of the time

Datadog vs NetApp Cloud Insights

Compared 31% of the time

More NetApp Cloud Insights Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Azure NetApp Files

July 2025

Download Azure NetApp Files product report

Buyer's Guide

NetApp Cloud Insights

July 2025

Download NetApp Cloud Insights product report

Also Known As

NetApp ANF, ANF

No data available

Overview

Azure NetApp Files is designed for unstructured data, virtualized SAP systems, SQL backups, NFS and CIFS protocols, Azure Virtual Desktop storage, and optimizing file share services. It supports high performance and networking integration in Microsoft Azure.

Azure NetApp Files offers features such as SnapMirror for data protection, rapid provisioning, elastic scaling, and ultra-fast SQL backup and restore. It provides a seamless experience with fast snapshotting, high availability, security, and ease of setup. Users benefit from significant performance improvements and the ability to manage substantial workload migrations effortlessly. This service is ideal for environments like Azure Kubernetes Service and cloud EPM platforms, where speed, flexibility, and performance are crucial.

What are the key features?

Flexibility: Adaptable to diverse storage needs.
Rapid response time: Ensures quick data access and operations.
SnapMirror: Provides replication and data protection.
SEC compliance: SnapLock ensures regulatory adherence.
Ultra-fast SQL backup: Quicker backup and restore operations.
Elastic scaling: Easily adjusts resources based on demand.
Fast snapshotting: Enables quick data snapshots.
High availability: Ensures consistent data access.
Security: Robust measures for data protection.

What are the expected benefits and ROI?

Performance: Notable improvement in processing speeds.
Simplicity of setup: Easy deployment and configuration.
Scalable management: Handles significant workload migrations with ease.
Cost efficiency: Allows comparing throughput versus cost effectively.

Azure NetApp Files is implemented in various industries requiring robust file storage solutions, from educational environments where performance boosts are critical to businesses leveraging Azure Kubernetes Service for containerized applications. It supports high-demand environments, optimizing data management and improving efficiency.

NetApp

NetApp Cloud Insights is an infrastructure monitoring tool that gives you visibility into your complete infrastructure. With Cloud Insights, you can monitor, troubleshoot and optimize all your resources including your public clouds and your private data centers.

NetApp

Sample Customers

SAP, Restaurant Magic

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Azure NetApp Files vs. NetApp Cloud Insights

July 2025

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