Takeaways from the 2019 Nasuni Chicago User Group

Nasuni recently took the “Windy City” by storm for our third and final Regional User Group of 2019, closing out the series with a bang! Our interactive user groups create an environment where customers can learn about product updates, popular trends in the industry, and, most importantly, collaborate with peers to discuss best practices. It was awesome having more than 50 enthusiastic customers ready to learn, collaborate and discuss hard-hitting questions surrounding how to modernize file infrastructure with Nasuni and cloud storage.

My favorite session – the Customer Roundtable – gives our customers an open forum to share their personal experiences with Nasuni and storage in general. During this time the room was electric, covering important industry themes such as ransomware attacks, data propagation, and C-level directives to get data into the cloud. Not all of our customers can make these in-person events, so we thought we would summarize some of the top takeaways:

• Cloud-first – I asked ‘how many of your companies have a cloud-first initiative?’ This year there was a big uptick, with about 70% of the room saying they are being told they need to look at cloud solutions first before investing in more on-prem technology.
• Eliminate File Backup – probably the most excitement I saw was our older customers explaining to our newer customers how you can completely eliminate all file backup infrastructure (software, hardware, and manpower) with Nasuni Continuous File Versioning. And gain instant file recovery, too. Now that’s showing the power of the cloud!
• Ransomware – a few of our customers talked about the increase in ransomware attacks and how Nasuni enables them to rollback their volumes to just a few minutes before the attack hits to mitigate the damage.
• Cost justification – it’s always good to hear your customer talk about dramatic cost savings. Moving from legacy on-premises NAS infrastructures (storage, backup, DR, etc.) to Nasuni and cloud storage is saving the customers who were in the room millions of dollars, judging from the stories they shared.
• Cloud lock-in – they confirmed that we need to continue to invest in being cloud-agnostic. Even if customers were not multi-cloud today, it was clear they want the ability to move their data easily between clouds, or leverage other clouds’ services to run analytics on their file data.
• Office 365 – customers brought up that Office 365 sometimes introduces confusion for their organizations. Some CIOs will ask ‘why do we need Nasuni when we have O365 and its file storage?’ Our customers totally understand the differences between personal shares for small Office docs versus a cloud platform for storing, backing up, and synchronizing unstructured data at scale, but it was important for us to hear. They asked us to create materials to help them share this differentiation with their executives. We are on it!
• Inactive data – there was a lively discussion around not all data being the same. Customers did not place the same value on data that might be considered ‘cool’ or ‘inactive’ data. There was a good discussion around the fact that they should still strive to centralize all file data (active and inactive) so it can be accessed if needed and so data analytics can be applied. We shared how our pricing model accommodates inactive data to ensure our customers can feel good about consolidating and future-proofing all of their file data with Nasuni and cloud storage.
• Data propagation – many of the customers at this user group leverage our multi-site file synchronization and patented Nasuni Global File Lock These are two of our coolest capabilities. The concept of sharing file data across many locations (sometimes hundreds) and enabling users to collaborate on even very large files, like those created by Adobe Creative Cloud, Autodesk, Microsoft Office, and Siemens Teamcenter, is not an easy one to grasp – or engineer a solution to! We have succeeded because we built a cloud-native platform that propagates only changes to active files – first to the “gold copy” in cloud storage, and then to the copies cached in other edge locations. That’s how Nasuni is able to deliver extremely high transmission rates that far exceed those achieved with legacy file transfer and synchronization technologies.
• Cloud migrations – Anything we can do to speed up the process of moving files from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud was flagged as very important. We shared some cool previews about what’s coming soon in this area – tune into this space in about 30 days!
• Who is Nasuni – lastly, I asked the room ‘how would you describe Nasuni to friends?’ What I heard back was ‘Nasuni is a cloud file services platform.’ I couldn’t have said it better myself!

As we conclude our 2019 Regional User Group series, we are grateful to have such an involved group of customers who help us improve the product each day. We look forward to continued input and collaboration during our 2020 Regional User Group series! Be sure to keep an eye out for a meeting near you and be part of the conversation!