Solving the Unstructured Data Paradox: The Nasuni Way to Smarter Data, Cost Savings, and AI Success in 2026

As we look ahead to 2026, every technology leader faces two mandates from the boardroom: 1) cut infrastructure costs without adding risk, and 2) deliver effective AI solutions that generate real, measurable business value.

At the heart of both challenges lies a paradox: unstructured data. It’s growing exponentially, and driving massive costs in storage, protection, and management. However, it’s also the critical fuel every AI model depends on to be truly successful.

This paradox comes down to two opposing realities:

• Organizations know their unstructured data is immensely valuable. It holds intellectual property, customer insights, compliance records, and the potential for AI innovation.
• They can’t easily access, protect, or leverage it. The data is fragmented across silos (think on-prem, in the cloud, and on countless devices), duplicated in backups, and locked behind incompatible formats or systems.

The result? Despite having more unstructured data than ever (and investing heavily to store and protect it), most companies derive little actionable value from it. In essence, they’re “data rich but insight poor.” That fragmentation is one of the biggest reasons AI initiatives stall before reaching production. In fact, an MIT study found that roughly 95% of enterprise generative AI pilots fail to deliver measurable results in part due to incomplete or inconsistent data foundations.

But what if there were a single solution that could control unstructured data costs and risk while also creating the foundation for long-term AI success? That’s exactly what Nasuni delivers.

1. Cost-Optimized: Do More with Less

“Do More with Less” isn’t just a mantra. It’s a mandate. Nasuni was built from the ground up to help IT leaders cut storage infrastructure costs without risk or performance trade-offs. By replacing traditional file storage, backup, and disaster recovery systems with a single, multi cloud platform, Nasuni simplifies operations and delivers immediate savings.

By storing unstructured data as-cost effective objects in your choice of cloud — AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or private — Nasuni eliminates costly overprovisioning while ensuring fast, familiar file access everywhere. This approach reflects Gartner’s view that true cost optimization isn’t just about cutting spend, but creating a sustainable discipline that reduces waste, improves performance, and fuels innovation. In a recent 2025 report, Gartner named Nasuni a top vendor in hybrid cloud storage and unstructured data management for helping enterprises achieve that balance.

Customers routinely report infrastructure management cost reductions after replacing legacy file systems and backup/disaster recovery point solutions with the Nasuni File Data Platform. Whether you’re optimizing cloud storage spend today or preparing for large-scale AI workloads tomorrow, Nasuni meets you where you are and grows at your pace.

2. Secure by Design: Built-In Resilience

With cyber threats and ransomware on the rise, recovery must be automatic, not reactive. Nasuni’s patented UniFS® global file system continuously captures immutable snapshots, creating a versioned history of every file as often as every minute. If ransomware hits, you can restore rapidly to a clean state.

This means faster recovery times and no data loss.

Nasuni also integrates directly with enterprise SIEM/SOAR tools, giving security teams visibility and the ability to take action instantly and in an automated fashion across every edge and cloud location. This isn’t layered-on data security. It’s security engineered into the foundation of the Nasuni platform. And because Nasuni operates at the data layer, the insights it provides can even help fuel cyber tools’ AI to make smarter, more effective decisions.

3. High-Performing: Fast, Familiar, Frictionless File Access

Every organization’s success depends on how easily teams can access, share, and act on the information that drives the business. Nasuni makes that effortless by combining the familiar experience of working with files and folders with the scalability and cost efficiency of cloud object storage.

With intelligent edge caching, a single global namespace, and global file locking, Nasuni delivers local performance anywhere in the world. Teams can open, edit, and collaborate on large files — from design assets to engineering drawings — without overwrites, lag, or disruption. The result: teams stay in sync, projects move faster, and critical assets are always available, securely and instantly.

By keeping the user experience simple and familiar, Nasuni empowers employees to focus on innovation and growth while IT gains the savings, scalability, and resiliency of the cloud. It turns everyday file access into a true business advantage.

4. AI-Ready: Turning Unstructured Data into AI Fuel

Gartner suggests that through 2026, organizations will abandon 60% of AI projects unsupported by AI-ready data, a problem that’s forcing many leading companies to go back to the drawing board to answer one fundamental question: “Is our data AI ready?”

For most enterprises, the honest answer is: not yet. As much as 80% of enterprise data is unstructured, scattered across silos, duplicated, and poorly governed.

Nasuni changes that. With its unique architecture powered by UniFS and unstructured data management (UDM) services, Nasuni creates a unified, and secure data foundation for AI success. Your data becomes organized, versioned, and discoverable. It’s ready to power analytics, LLMs, and generative AI models with confidence.

Below are just a few real-world AI use cases:

• Institutional Knowledge Discovery and GenAI: Accelerate decision making with rapid access to unified, accurate corporate data sources. Shorten research and project development times with secure access to years of experience and lessons learned. Automate generation of new work items – sales proposals, RFI responses, competitive battle cards, and more – all while ensuring permissions are enforced, so workers don’t have access to data and content they should not be able to access.
• Professional Services: Teams deal with numerous pages of case law, contracts, and compliance documents, requiring extensive time and effort to locate and extract relevant details. Integration with Nasuni allows teams to discover and identify key clauses, precedents, and risks, and generate new documents and artifacts, eliminating hours of work per week per knowledge worker.
• Manufacturing: Process integration with Nasuni enables better production planning, quality control, and reduces knowledge gaps. Team members can quickly discover information and respond to project changes, facilitating fast collaboration on new information across dispersed teams. This enables predictive maintenance based on analysis of log and service data; quality inspection and defect detection through image analysis; and supplier quality and risk monitoring.

With Nasuni, the same platform that delivers lower TCO today becomes the engine of your AI success tomorrow.

Meeting You Where You Are

Our customers come to us because they’re overwhelmed by the explosive growth of unstructured data — frustrated by storage sprawl, ransomware risks, and the hidden costs of both hardware and siloed cloud services. Many are taking their first steps into the cloud, while others are still struggling to get what they need from their legacy NAS systems. Even organizations already in the cloud often find that the advanced capabilities of leading providers still fall short of delivering the full benefits of a purpose-built, enterprise-grade file system.

That challenge is what drives our purpose forward. Nasuni uniquely delivers the combination of unlimited scale, rapid recovery, high-performance global collaboration, and true multi-cloud freedom wherever you are in your data journey. Our customers stay because we deliver dramatic cost savings — eliminating hardware refreshes, reducing infrastructure spend, and simplifying operations — while protecting their business and giving teams fast, reliable access to business-critical assets anywhere in the world.

And while we solve their most pressing challenges today, we also provide something more: a powerful data foundation that positions our customers to lead in the future of data management and AI-driven innovation.

Here’s what that can mean in practice for today’s technology leaders:

• Save up to 67% in infrastructure costs without risk or performance trade-offs.

• Reduce risk with up to 99% faster disaster recovery time.
• Enable high performance and global collaboration by up to 7x.
• Build a well-managed, AI-ready foundation for innovation.

So, as you’re planning your 2026 IT strategy, we want you to know we are here to help. Because Nasuni isn’t just another storage platform, we have the technology and team to support you in finally solving the “unstructured data paradox.”

Connect with us to turn today’s challenges into tomorrow’s advantage.