Sunnyvale: The changing role of IT is forcing departments to rethink the way they interact with the rest of the business, according to the chief information officer of NetApp.

CIO Cynthia Stoddard told reporters that lessons learned through the company’s own IT operations have caused the firm to take a closer look at the way its own customers can leverage IT staff and bring technology administrators better in line with the business side.

“I have found that transparency around infrastructure costs really helps,” she said.

“The business side has felt that IT is trying to hide something. If you open up and put some of that on the table it becomes more of the business.”

The result can be support for new initiatives such as hybrid cloud deployments or the addition of support for web services to help supplement on-premise technologies and services.

Stoddard described such a process within NetApp’s own walls. The company has recently adopted a “Net cloud” campaign which gathers information on the various cloud services and instances being used by employees and attempts to migrate them over to a private hosted cloud which allows for improved security and managability.

Big data has also played a role in helping to shape NetApp’s newest platforms. Stoddard said that the company has bolstered its efforts to build and implement big data platforms which collect and analyse information on support queries and incident reports.

The efforts have helped shape some of NetApp product features, such as remote support and “phone home” diagnostic technologies.