Customers Speak: Four Reasons Why Companies Are Choosing Hybrid Cloud Storage for Their File-Based Workloads

Nasuni has been a Microsoft partner since before it was cool. We secured Gold-Level status in 2014 and were named Microsoft Global ISV Partner of the Year in 2017. So I was thrilled to have the chance to bring together longtime collaborator Mouhamed Diagne, Director of Digital Sales and Customer Success in Intelligent Cloud at Microsoft with two valued clients –  Andy Kimura, IT Director at Kleinfelder, and Michael Chan, Director of IT at GeoVerra – at an exclusive event in Dallas. The three of us sat down together for a fireside chat about identifying the best Azure strategy for file-based workloads. What struck me from sharing our experiences, was the broad range of factors that can drive a move to hybrid cloud. In this piece, I’ll share some of the motivators we discussed.

The need for better global collaboration

It’s been said that the data center is no longer the center of data. The need to collaborate across time zones and geographies is here to stay. For Andy, there was a pivotal moment that highlighted this: “Our story changed because we acquired a company. This new company worked distributedly, so we needed a way to be able to distribute data. And we didn’t have a technology for that.”

End users aren’t patient. They expect to be able to collaborate in real-time with high performance. This is where hybrid cloud solutions come into their own. They combine the scale and reach of object storage with intelligent edge caching for high performance. Nasuni also offers Global File Lock®, a patented technology which enables dispersed teams to collaborate on the same file without fear of conflicts or corruption.

The need for faster performance

Michael’s story is not unique and certainly relatable by many enterprise organizations. His team had been struggling with the poor performance of their NAS storage: “Before Nasuni, we did all sorts of things to try to get quick access to the files, through web development and other tools. We’ve heard of teams waiting hours – even days – to sync data between offices, of business operations slowing to a crawl.”

Like many of our customers, Michael’s experience with hybrid cloud performance sounds familiar: “After we’d implemented Nasuni, the speed was near instant. On top of that, Nasuni added Global File Acceleration, which allowed our syncing to occur even quicker. We didn’t believe it!”

It’s Nasuni’s unique hub and spoke model that enables this. Where other cloud-based solutions rely on on-premise caching, Nasuni maintains a gold-copy in the cloud, which gets pushed down to the intelligent edges. These edges can be virtual, in Azure, or on-premise for the local-like performance Michael described.

The need to protect valuable data

Mouhamed shared sobering stories about the impact of ransomware: “customers are prevented from working from days to weeks. That’s a lot of money lost.” Legacy NAS servers are particularly vulnerable to attacks, and the impacts can be far-reaching. Unplanned downtime, business structure damage, and the associated reputational risks. In addition, these legacy NAS devices need separate backup software and hardware making management very difficult and costly.

The hybrid cloud approach has built in data security. The Nasuni File Data Platform is so intelligent, it knows when a ransomware event is happening, which gives you the power to take appropriate action, fast. Nasuni also offers continuous file versioning, which provides customers with the ability to roll back the clock to any given point in time without requiring separate backup systems. This drastically cuts the RTO and RPO times, which frees up IT leaders to improve other areas of the business. Andy sums it up: “as an IT manager, it allowed me to sleep better at night, knowing that the data was secure”.

The need to become AI-ready

AI has been a buzzword for a while. Let’s take a moment to separate the hype from the reality. The reality is, that if your IP resides in unstructured file data, you could be missing out on a massive opportunity to derive value from that data.

Extracting that value is an iterative journey. When enterprises come to Nasuni, their unstructured data is often siloed across legacy hardware, FTP repositories and local machines, so our first move is to consolidate. Next comes the management, where we shine a light on “dark” data and decide which is valuable for use by AI. Once the curation is complete can you begin to leverage this data for AI and start extracting that untapped value.

The easiest business decision is rarely the best one

An experience that Mouhamed from Microsoft shared really stuck with me. He used to spend his time convincing customers why they should move to the cloud. Now, he’s asking customers to convince him why they should stay on-premise. That perfectly aligns with something that I’ve long believed: the easiest business decision is always to stick with the status quo. But it is rarely the smartest or most strategic business decision.

The way we work is changing. We’re living through an explosion of unstructured data. Doing things the way they have always been done is starting to become a risky strategy. It’s the businesses that adapt that will feel the benefits. And that’s where Nasuni can help.

Hear about more benefits of hybrid cloud by watching the panel talk in full here.