Why Manufacturing Giants are Upgrading to Cloud File Services

The excitement here at Nasuni just keeps growing for cloud file services. In the last few weeks, we’ve reported some tremendous overall results from 2022, but in this post I’m excited to release some hard numbers reflecting our momentum in one particular industry sector.

Since Q1 2021, Nasuni’s file data under management within the manufacturing industry has grown by 243%. We’ve seen 66% growth in the number of our manufacturing customers, and the last time I checked, we were storing, protecting, and facilitating collaboration of cloud file data at more than 1,800 locations in 55 countries worldwide for the manufacturing industry. This growth is the outcome of an array of converging forces and trends, including a rapidly evolving industry, Nasuni platform enhancements, a larger market shift to cloud services, and the continued threat of ransomware.

Manufacturing companies have long been a staple of Nasuni’s customer base. Today we’re proud to count many leading brands as customers, including , a global automotive technology leader. Our customers make everything from hard drives to sweatshirts. Their organizations are distributed across multiple locations, including design- and business-focused sites and the plants that manufacture their products, and their file data needs to be rapidly and securely shared between regionally or even globally distant sites.

These companies need to digitize to thrive within an increasingly competitive market. As they go through these digital transformations, they need solutions which break down data silos and accelerate workflows between locations. They’re seeing that the old ways of doing things — cobbling together a distributed mix of NAS hardware, backup, etc. — just won’t cut it anymore.

The Nasuni File Data Platform makes the file infrastructure piece of that digital transformation easy. Managing the platform is simple. ““It’s a real set-it-and-forget-it solution,” says Hybrid Apparel IT Infrastructure Consultant Mark Valpreda. “I touch the system so little that I have to remind myself how to interact with Nasuni if someone can’t access a file and needs my help.” Valpreda adds he’s actually able to sleep better at night since he doesn’t have to lie awake worrying about storage, data loss or downtime. There can be a significant performance gain for global manufacturers as well. Western Digital cut its global file transfer times from 12 hours to 8 minutes and retired 100+ storage devices after switching to Nasuni. On top of that, the platform drives major savings. Our customers end up reducing storage costs by an average of 50% relative to legacy infrastructure.

Yet there is another major force driving Nasuni adoption in the industry: Manufacturing firms have become a target for ransomware. The National Association of Manufacturers reports that manufacturing represented 65% of industrial ransomware attacks in 2021. The industry was targeted six times more than the runner-up, food and beverage. The downtime resulting from a ransomware attack is debilitating for any business. But it can be especially damaging to manufacturers. If you can’t access your files, then you can’t make your products.

Every hour of downtime counts in manufacturing, so these companies have been eager to upgrade to Nasuni to enhance their ransomware resilience. With Nasuni, rapid ransomware recovery is built into the platform. All our customers have the ability to restore millions of files that have been maliciously encrypted to the latest version prior to the attack within minutes. Last year, we added a Ransomware Protection add-on service that helps companies identify, report, and mitigate threats at the edge. This limits the scope of the attack and allows our customers to get up and running again even faster.

As I noted above, we’ve been working with manufacturing leaders since the company’s early years, but we’re excited to report our recent traction – 243% growth, in case you forgot — because it validates so much of what we have been focusing on here at Nasuni. Unlimited scale, unprecedented savings, operational simplicity, and unmatched ransomware resilience — all in one global cloud file services platform.