Why Storage Predictability Is Now a Board-Level Issue — And What Forward-Looking Organizations Are Doing About It

Enterprise leaders share how rising costs, unpredictability, and AI demands are forcing a rethink of storage infrastructure—and what comes next.

For years, storage infrastructure followed a predictable pattern. Hardware refreshes every three to five years. Budget cycles aligned. Procurement timelines understood. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked.

Today, that model is under pressure from every direction.

Hardware costs are rising and supply chains are unpredictable. Unstructured data volumes are exploding. And at the same time, the business is demanding more from IT than ever before, especially when it comes to AI.

What used to be a standard infrastructure decision has quietly become something much bigger. In a recent conversation on modernizing file infrastructure, Nick Burling, Chief Product Officer at Nasuni, put it plainly:

“What used to be pretty routine planning… has now created specific planning risk and gotten all the way up to board-level executive attention.”

The conversation can no longer be limited to storage, but how organizations operate, compete, and grow.

The Moment Predictability Broke

If there’s one word leaders keep coming back to, it’s this: unpredictability.

Not just higher costs — though those matter — but the fundamental inability to plan.

We see quotes that expire in days and delivery timelines shift without warning. Capacity planning has become guesswork. And yet, unstructured data growth hasn’t slowed. It’s accelerating, growing at roughly 20% annually across industries.

In many organizations, tension is showing up in very real ways.

Glen Ridnour, Vice President of Huitt-Zollars, a 600-person engineering and architectural consulting firm operating across 24 U.S. offices, knows this firsthand. For years, local NAS at every office was non-negotiable. Engineers working with massive CAD files, 3D renderings, and complex design models needed local performance. Any latency was unacceptable.

But that model created a different kind of fragility.

When extreme weather events shut down access to the firm’s Dallas office (the center of their data universe) the business didn’t just slow down. It stopped.

“We felt like we could control it — but we couldn’t reach it for three days. In our business, that’s a problem. Time is literally money.”

— Glen Ridnour, CTO, Huitt-Zollars

That kind of disruption used to be an edge case. Today, it’s part of the operating environment.

The Hidden Cost Isn’t Hardware — It’s Disruption

When leaders talk about storage challenges, cost is always part of the conversation. But it’s rarely the most consequential part.

What matters more is what the hardware refresh cycle does to the business.

Every hardware upgrade introduces a ripple effect:

• Planning windows that stretch across months
• Coordination across teams and applications
• Testing cycles, migration risks, and downtime exposure

It’s what Jerry Carter, CTO at Nasuni, describes as a “planned disruption” — a voluntary change event that organizations have simply learned to tolerate:

“It becomes very reactive… you’re not focusing on business outcomes, you’re trying to manage when your refresh is going to show up.”

— Jerry Carter, CTO, Nasuni

And the real cost isn’t just operational. It’s strategic.

Time spent managing infrastructure is time not spent on innovation, AI initiatives, or business growth. Customers who eliminate hardware refresh cycles with a cloud-native platform report reclaiming up to 75% of file storage administration time, freeing IT to focus on what actually moves the business forward.

Complexity Is the Real Risk Multiplier

Most enterprises don’t have “a storage system.” They have an ecosystem.

Primary storage. Backup. Disaster recovery. Edge systems. Security layers. Vendor dependencies. Each one solves a piece of the problem but together creating something far more complex and far more fragile.

That complexity compounds risk.

It increases the likelihood of gaps — whether in security, ransomware resilience, or recovery. It stretches already-constrained IT teams. And it makes it harder to respond when something inevitably goes wrong.

“The more complexity you have, the more opportunity there is for things to slip between the gaps.”

— Nick Burling, CPO, Nasuni

There’s also a human cost that doesn’t show up in any budget line.

As Jerry Carter put it, highly skilled engineers are drawn to the industry to build, create, and innovate — not to manage refresh cycles and babysit siloed systems. When organizations trap their best people in reactive infrastructure management, they feel it in productivity, morale, and retention.

Huitt-Zollars experienced this directly. With 24 offices and an IT team of just 11 people, managing NAS hardware at every location — including sites without dedicated IT staff — meant tapes that didn’t get changed, backups that didn’t happen, and a data retention liability that kept Glen up at night.

“I have to retain data twelve years after substantial completion of a project. I can’t have archives just not happen. That’s a legal liability.”

— Glen Ridnour, CTO, Huitt-Zollars

Rethinking the Model, Not Just the Vendor

One of the most consistent themes from leadership conversations is this: the problem isn’t just which storage solution you choose, it’s the model itself.

The traditional approach assumes:

• Capacity must be actively managed
• Infrastructure must be refreshed on a cycle
• Storage is inherently tied to hardware

But those assumptions are increasingly out of step with reality.

Progressive leaders are asking a fundamentally different question:

What if storage didn’t have to be a recurring disruption at all?

Glen’s advice to peers still stuck in the refresh loop is direct:

“Don’t be afraid to step back and reevaluate. Define your success in terms of business goals. Talk about the reduced risk of potential downtime or data loss. Talk about the periodic disruption that you’re not going to have anymore because you’re just going to add another increment of data and move on down the road.”

— Glen Ridnour, CTO, Huitt-Zollars

That shift from managing infrastructure to managing unstructured data as a continuous, governed business asset is at the heart of what’s changing in the market.

The most effective path forward replaces traditional NAS hardware, backup, and DR with a single cloud-native platform: one that scales infinitely, protects data automatically, and enables global collaboration without the overhead of hardware ownership. This is what Nasuni’s UniFS® architecture was purpose-built to deliver — fusing cloud object storage with enterprise file services to eliminate the tradeoffs organizations have accepted for decades.

It aligns closely with what enterprise buyers are already prioritizing: durable cost control, reduced operational risk, and platforms that simplify the environment. And critically, it shifts IT spend from unpredictable CapEx to predictable OpEx, something Glen notes even made his CFO smile.

Real-World Impact: From Anxiety to Stability

For organizations that have moved away from the traditional model, the change is often described less in technical terms — and more in what it feels like to operate without the weight of legacy infrastructure.

Less stress. Less uncertainty. More control.

Glen described what the current NAS market chaos would feel like without a cloud-native foundation:

“The anxiety associated with not knowing if you can get hardware — or what it’s going to cost when you do get it — is not something I’d assume not to have.”

— Glen Ridnour, CTO, Huitt-Zollars

In practical terms, the shift shows up in everyday decisions. Huitt-Zollars is currently bringing three new offices online. Provisioning storage for those locations is a non-event.

Recovery from ransomware or infrastructure incidents is measured in minutes, not days or weeks. And the immutable snapshot capability that once felt like a luxury is now the foundation of the firm’s entire data protection strategy.

“I sleep at night now… which is not something I did for a long time.”

— Glen Ridnour, CTO, Huitt-Zollars

That’s not a technical metric, but it might be one of the most meaningful. It’s also reflected in Nasuni’s 98% customer satisfaction rating, and in the stories customers consistently share about what changes when unstructured data is finally secure, scalable, and under control.

What Leaders Should Do Next

For leaders navigating this moment, the path forward isn’t about reacting faster — it’s about thinking differently.

The organizations making progress share a few consistent approaches.

They’re stepping back and questioning long-held assumptions about refresh cycles and infrastructure ownership. They’re reframing conversations in terms of business risk and strategic opportunity — not just line-item costs. They’re prioritizing simplification: collapsing storage, backup, and DR into a single platform, shifting from unpredictable CapEx to predictable OpEx, and building a data foundation that supports growth rather than constraining it.

Perhaps most importantly, they’re learning from peers who’ve already made the move.

Nick Burling’s advice to those still on the fence is simple:

“Go talk to the other Glens of the world… hear it directly from the people that have already made that decision.” — Nick Burling, CPO, Nasuni

Watch the full conversation with Glen Ridnour, Jerry Carter, and Nick Burling to hear how leaders are navigating this shift firsthand.

The shift underway is straightforward, but profound:

From managing storage…

 …to enabling the business through data.

Organizations that embrace that shift now won’t just navigate today’s challenges more effectively. They’ll be positioned to lead in cost efficiency, resilience, collaboration, and AI — for everything that comes next.