Case Study: McKesson achieves faster innovation, greater reliability, and lower cloud costs with NetApp

Data-Driven Innovations in the Public Cloud for Patients in Need

McKesson, the largest healthcare company in the U.S. that distributes roughly one-third of North American medicines, faced aging infrastructure and a cramped private-cloud environment that limited development, testing, and timely delivery of critical healthcare applications. With strict regulatory and speed-to-patient demands, the company needed a more reliable, scalable, and data-driven platform to improve time to market and ensure medications reach patients when needed.

Using NetApp’s Data Fabric strategy, McKesson moved key workloads to a public cloud powered by Cloud Volumes ONTAP, Azure NetApp Files, NetApp AFF/E-Series, and associated tools (OnCommand Insight, SnapMirror, Azure Site Recovery). The new platform boosted performance and reliability, lowered public-cloud costs versus private-cloud alternatives, freed developers to innovate faster (advancing timelines by years), enabled DR as a service, and supported data initiatives such as opioid-misuse detection—strengthening business relationships and patient outcomes.

McKesson

Brad Clark

Director of Storage Systems and Data Protection