New Beginnings: Realizing Potential

As one journey comes to an end, a new chapter begins with Nasuni. I and the rest of the SME team are thrilled to be Nasunistas!

David Grant, Nasuni president, did a great job in covering Why Nasuni Bought Storage Made Easy and I’d like to add my thoughts on the potential the combination of these two technologies creates.

First, let’s talk about data. Data is the most valuable asset that a company owns. Data is the lifeblood of how a company operates day-to-day and is essential to maintaining and increasing its competitive advantage. Unfortunately, in the world we live in today, a company’s data asset can quickly turn sour.  It can be subject to ransomware attacks, fall foul of compliance regimes or be exposed in some high-profile public data breach. The chance of this occurring exponentially increases in large organizations with multi-cloud environments and in which data access is through folder shares on desktop PC’s, which is still predominately the most productive, convenient, and widely used access mechanism for end users to interact with their corporate data

Additionally, how companies access data has changed, which contributes to many of the risks above. Data access used to be predominantly within the boundaries of the corporate office behind the company firewall, but now employees working from home, which was necessitated by Covid, appears to be here to stay. The genie is “out of the bottle” so to speak and many businesses appear to be embracing either a fully work from home culture or in most cases going ‘hybrid’ in which some staff are in the office and some are working from home. This means that the experience for end users working from home has to be consistent whether that data resides on cloud or in the corporate office.

The pandemic has also accelerated many companies who had not adopted a cloud-first strategy to begin embracing cloud in earnest as well as accelerating the adoption of technologies that enable hybrid access to cloud data, locally. Data has gravity and for many industries who have employees working from a branch or small office also require fast, local access to their data sets. Such on-site data access requirements are not going away anytime soon, so remote working, data flexibility, and corporate resiliency have prioritized mainstream digital transformation projects for most companies. Access, of course, needs to be coupled with the requirement for more robustness in data protection and compliance strategies in order to fully protect remote workers.

Remote working also has its own unique data challenges particularly with regards to employee productivity. In an office, it’s easy to shout across a room when a particular file cannot be found, but not so easy when at home. Where is the file? Is it the latest version? Is it on the user’s home share or is it in the projects share? No, hang on, it may be on-cloud. In a metadata-driven world, enterprise content search and enterprise content detection is not a nice to have, it’s a need to have.

This leads me back to why I am excited about the potential of Nasuni’s acquisition of SME. It’s the ability to solve the data complexity challenges outlined above coupled with the opportunity to offer an alternative to the highly complex and costly integrations (often prone to failure!) that I see many companies still doing.  Such costly integration processes are broken.  I have always felt that there had to be a better way to surface data, protect data, while making data searchable, productive, and accessible for any employee regardless of what type of data and where it is located.  The combination of Nasuni and SME provides that solution. Being at Nasuni to help facilitate this for companies that require it, and let’s be honest most companies do, is an exciting place to be.