The full version of the Filer has only been out for a month, but we are already seeing a wide range of use cases. Last week, we discussed a consulting firm that plans to use the Filer to quickly and inexpensively set up secure, high-performance offices in remote locations. We are also seeing plenty of interest from schools and universities.
The education field is intriguing because they typically don’t have the budget of a big company, so they are very price sensitive, but they often have a huge number of clients – a typical university could have upwards of 10,000 students. Since the standard model for NAS pricing is on a per client basis, this can get really expensive. There are special offers for schools, but even $1/license can be pricey when you start talking about 15,000 or 20,000 students. That is big money.
The Filer, on the other hand, supports an unlimited number of clients. This is standard. Customers pay only for the storage they use in the cloud, plus a small monthly fee for our technology. We level the costs and ease the management burdens that come with licensing.
Large schools aren’t the only ones poised to take advantage of the technology. The IT Administrator of a smaller school in England came to us looking for a simple, secure, and inexpensive way to do backup. He didn’t want to have to worry about protection, sending tapes out to another facility, or expanding storage space by adding drives. He has about 300 users and access control is also very important to him; he wanted a system with tight, solid integration with Active Directory. The idea was to give all of his users a mapped drive of network storage on their desktops, then set it up so a simple program like Robocopy copied files over to that drive on a regular schedule.
The Filer makes all this easy. Instead of adding drives, he gets the backing of the unlimited cloud. Files are encrypted and sent over a secure line to the cloud, and they cannot be decrypted until the Filer calls them back. They are always encrypted away from the customer’s site. To the user, none of this is going to seem very different or difficult. The Filer looks like any other network drive. But users will now have two copies of every file, and they can go and retrieve older, backed-up versions in case they delete something by mistake.
The IT Administrator can access snapshots of past data, too. And since users are all logged in to Active Directory, he has easy access control: Users only see their section of the drive. It’s not as if one person can read everyone else’s files.
The Nasuni Filer gives him all the functionality he was looking for – protection, security, ease-of-use, added storage, etc. – and it does so without demanding a huge investment upfront. Wondering if Nasuni can solve your storage problems? Contact us at info@nasuni.com.