5 Ways to Free IT Resources for Strategic Projects

Do you enjoy spending the weekend babysitting backups? I didn’t think so.

One of the advantages of a global file system is how much time it can give back to your IT department. An enterprise-level global file system doesn’t require constant oversight. It just works, and it eliminates so many thankless tasks. Our clients don’t waste cycles on storage refreshes, backup licensing, provisioning servers, or restoring lost files from tapes. Instead, Nasuni’s global file system gives IT professionals the time to develop the kind of strategic projects ­that really push the business forward.

Here are 5 ways Nasuni allows our clients to redirect IT to strategic projects:

1. Backup is Gone: One of our large media clients originally approached us because they had to refresh their backup technology at 80+ sites around the world. The project was going to cost $3M and only protect about 80% of their file data. They would have had to rely on different solutions at different sites to protect all their files. Today, thanks to Nasuni Continuous File Versioning®, the firm is protecting all of its global file data, at all locations, for a fraction of the cost. Since the IT group is also overseeing one platform across all those locations, they’ve freed up a tremendous amount of time.
2. Provisioning is Easier: Adding capacity at any location or provisioning a newly acquired office no longer means buying and installing hardware – or negotiating price and service terms. With Nasuni, capacity can be added with a phone call.
3. Management is Remote: The Nasuni Management Console allows IT to accomplish more from a distance, including provisioning capacity, changing permissions, and restoring lost files or file volumes.
4. Support Calls Drop: Organizations that switch from traditional file storage and data protection to Nasuni report a significant reduction in file-related support calls. Todd Stewart, Vice President, Global Infrastructure and IT Operations at Western Digital, says that Nasuni’s impact on his enterprise has been tremendous. “It was a daily fire drill,” he recalls. “Now there’s less babysitting of data, and certainly it’s easier to take care of one global ecosystem than 150 NAS devices from 7 OEMs in 40 different locations, of various ages and firmware releases, probably none of which you yourself deployed.”

Today, all of that has been replaced by one global file system that allows his IT team to remotely manage storage and permissions, restore deleted files, and more, across all its global offices, through the Nasuni Management Console. As Stewart puts it:

“My phone doesn’t ring off the hook anymore.”

5. Shadow IT Disappears: One of our clients, a major sportswear brand, chose our platform in part because the company’s creative teams needed to share and collaborate on business files quickly, securely, and efficiently. Prior to Nasuni, the company didn’t have a solution in place, so these team members started using their personal accounts in Box and Dropbox to share critical business files. When something went wrong – data loss, multiple people working on the same file, then having to find a way to resolve their version conflicts – the company’s IT group had to manage the problem. Often, there wasn’t a good solution, and both the users and IT lost valuable time.

Now that the firm has upgraded to Nasuni, users don’t need to depend on workarounds. IT gives them what they need. This is a win for end users, but it also drastically reduces the workload on IT.    

How Nasuni Clients Utilize Extra IT Cycles

Our clients are using this extra time to accelerate productivity, reduce time to market, and provide new business intelligence. This is the kind of work that earns credit at the C-level. For example, the IT team at Perkins+Will, a global architecture firm, built a program that allows its architects to search the firm’s vast image store for insights. The firm’s CIO credits his talented team, but he also notes that they only have the cycles for this kind of innovation because the switch to Nasuni has taken so many mundane tasks off their plate.

What would you do if you if you had extra cycles? What kind of dream project would you develop if you didn’t have to spend time babysitting your file storage? We’d love to hear about them and share more stories about what our own clients are doing.

Want to learn about all the other ways a global file system can accelerate your digital transformation?  Download the white paper:

6 Reasons to Accelerate Your 2019 Digital Transformation with a Global File System

Or read about how one of our large clients is using the solution today.