Work From Anywhere: Nasuni Scores AWS Digital Workplace Competency Status

One of the many things the pandemic has driven home is the need for end users to be able to work securely on virtually any device, from anywhere, at anytime. We’ve been providing this capability to enterprise customers for years, but at some companies it was more of a niche offering, or a bonus. Now it has become essential for every business. Which brings me to the news.

Yesterday we announced that Nasuni has achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) Digital Workplace Competency status. It means that we’ve demonstrated our ability to help customers shift to this anywhere, anytime virtual office. Solutions providers that achieve this AWS status have also shown that their technology can reduce security risks and meet compliance requirements, in addition to supporting remote work and business continuity plans. Basically, it’s Amazon’s way of telling their customers that our technology works, and works well.

Nasuni shifts enterprise file data out of offices and data centers and into the cloud. All the other benefits of the Nasuni platform, including the unlimited, on-demand capacity, the elimination of backup, global file sharing – everything stems from that fundamental shift. Once your file data is in the cloud with Nasuni, you have a more agile, cost-effective, future-proof file infrastructure. And of course, none of this would be possible without a powerful cloud partner like Amazon.

We have a long history with Amazon. The way it normally works is that Nasuni’s global file system resides and scales within Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to give companies unlimited capacity, built-in data protection, global file sharing, and more. In the Digital Workplace model, however, Nasuni pairs with Amazon WorkSpaces to give companies more scalability and better performance for their virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). Our enterprise customers often tell us that their previous cloud VDI initiatives fell short of expectations due to poor end user performance. Nasuni and Amazon change that. Since Nasuni maintains the gold or master copy of each file in Amazon S3, files are cached near your cloud-based WorkSpaces instances. There’s no more reaching across the wire, so users enjoy the kind of performance they need and expect.

The results can be transformative. Take our customer SDL, a multinational professional services company that specializes in language translation software and services. SDL has employees all over the world, and when those end users were suddenly forced to work from home at the start of the pandemic, the company had to react quickly or risk losing essential business. SDL turned to Nasuni and Amazon WorkSpaces, and set up virtual desktops for 1,500 essential employees in a weekend.

That’s right. 1,500 workers. One weekend. And everyone was up and running by that Monday, turning out work and generating revenue.

This is just one example of how the AWS Digital Workplace program is helping companies through this challenging time. And it can all be implemented without incurring the high costs typical of traditional VDI deployments. If you want to learn more, check out this informative webinar we hosted with Andrew Kloman, Global Technology Lead for AWS Digital Workplaces Partners. And as always, if you have have any questions, send us a note.