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Nasuni - Cloud Storage for SMB

Can cloud storage help small to medium size organizations really save money?
Written by Dan Kusnetzky, Contributor

Andres Rodriguez, CEO of Nasuni, and I spent some time speaking about economic and market trends and how cloud-based storage solutions just might be helpful to small to medium sized organizations. As always, Andres' thoughts were interesting, pragmatic and appeared, on first glance anyway, right on target.

In Andres' view, organizations are facing an environment that severely challenges their capability to respond. The customer is expecting them to constantly provide new, customized services and this forces them to look at ways to expand what their IT systems do. At the same time, these same organizations are facing the need to cut costs at almost any cost.

Although not a complete solution to the problem, Andres believes that a good place to start is to look at storage-related costs and see if placing some, or perhaps all, of the organizations data into a cloud-based solution would lower their overall costs, increase overall reliability and expand both scalability and flexibility. He would present that using cloud-based storage would offer the following benefits:

  • Trusted third-party or private clouds provide the storage. This may be significantly more reliable than local storage because it is being better managed.
  • Capacity is unlimited and adjusts automatically. Storage cost can be better aligned to the organization's needs over time.
  • Choose from a selection of clouds. The best fit for the organization's needs can be selected.
  • Divide files among providers. This approach creates a redundant, fail over environment without also requiring expensive clustered storage solutions.
  • End-to-end encryption secures files on your premises. Those organizations that worry about data leakage or misuse can 1) keep critical files on local machines and 2) encrypt off-premise data for better protection.
  • While Nasuni faces a number of competitors, Andres believes that "try it and buy it" approach will make a Nasuni decision easy. I think that Nasuni's biggest challenge is not the technology, but helping the industry understand the benefits of cloud computing in general and cloud storage in specific.

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