2025-26 DCIG TOP 5 Cybersecure 10PB+ NAS Solutions Report

DCIG LLC announces the availability of the 2025-26 DCIG TOP 5 Cybersecure 10PB+ NAS Solutions – Global Edition Report.

This DCIG TOP 5 report provides organizations with guidance on the best cybersecure 10PB+ NAS solutions. The report is available for download at no charge with registration.

NAS Solutions Embrace Cybersecurity
NAS solutions’ support for NFS and SMB continues to make them practical choices for all size organizations. Simple to set up, configure, and deploy, broadly adopted, and well-understood, the continued use and growth of NAS seems certain. However, these same strengths make NAS solutions targets during ransomware events due to their prevalent use by organizations

Forecast Use and Growth of NAS
The pace of data growth continues to accelerate in most organizations. More devices and applications generate more data and larger file sizes. Further, organizations increasingly use media files such as high-resolution images and videos.

Recent reports indicate that organizations will continue to expand their use of NAS solutions. For instance, Fortune Business Insights anticipates the global NAS market will nearly triple in value over the next 7 years. Valued at $40.3 billion in 2024, Forbes forecasts the NAS market could grow to nearly $130 billion by 2032.

While that estimate represents the high end of the forecasts reviewed by DCIG, all forecasts predict NAS usage to increase. More than 80% of organizations already use NAS, making its future seemingly secure for now. Further, NAS continues to offer new cybersecurity features that should encourage organizations to expand their use of it.

Network File Protocols Embrace Encryption
Nearly all file systems that organizations use support either the NFS or SMB network file protocols available on NAS solutions. This support led to NAS’s initial adoption and use in organizations. However, early versions of these network file protocols provided few or no options to encrypt transmitted data.

Leaving transmitted data unencrypted increases the risk of successful man-in-the-middle attacks. Man-in-the-middle attacks monitor data transmitted using network file protocols. These attacks may hijack sessions, collect sensitive data (passwords or personal or banking information,) alter transmitted data, or inject malicious payloads.

Recent security enhancements to NFS and SMB have given organizations increased confidence to continue using them. Mutual authentication, message signing and integrity features, and granular security policies represent just some of the improvements. Additionally, organizations can opt to encrypt data they transmit by using the latest NFSv4.x or SMB 3.x protocols.

Cybersecurity Now Core to NAS Solutions 

NAS solutions also remain targets during ransomware attacks as bad actors look to exploit their common usage by organizations. Ransomware may attempt to:

• Encrypt data stored on them, including snapshots or backup files.
• Exfiltrate data stored from them.
• Steal credentials to gain administrative privileges to the NAS solution itself.
• All the above.

In response, modern NAS solutions typically offer multiple cybersecurity features to protect data from attacks, including:

• Anomaly detection that monitors for unusual read or write activity
• At-rest encryption so that bad actors cannot read any data if exfiltrated.
• Cloud integration for backup, replication, and storage tiering.
• Immutable snapshots to facilitate fast, tamper-proof data restore.
• Integrations with Active Directory (AD) to authenticate individual administrators.
• Multi-factor authentication (MFA) to authenticate individual logins.
• Write Once Read Many (WORM) technologies to prevent ransomware from changing data.
• Zero trust integration.

By utilizing more cybersecurity features and NFS and SMB protocols supporting encryption, organizations may continue embracing these technologies. However, they will encounter many cybersecure NAS solutions from which to choose that possess notable differences in their respective architectures.

In preparing this report, DCIG formally evaluated about 40 different NAS solutions of which 24 met DCIG’s criteria for a 10PB+ NAS solution.

General categories under which the 300+ evaluated features of these 10PB+ NAS solutions fell included:

• Architecture
• Cyber Resilience
• Data Protection
• Deployment
• Efficiency
• Performance Management
• Performance Resources
• Product Management
• Technical Service and Support

Based on these criteria, DCIG awarded the following cybersecure 10PB+ NAS solutions a DCIG TOP 5 ranking (in alphabetical order):

• Arcitecta Mediaflux
• Huawei OceanStor Dorado 6000
• NetApp AFF A50
• Nutanix Unified Storage
• Tintri VMstore T7080

Report Availability:
The full 2025-26 DCIG TOP 5 Cybersecure 10PB+ NAS Solutions – Global Edition Report is available for download on DCIG’s site with registration.

Full DCIG TOP 5 report contains additional details such as:

• A list of the 24 10PB+ NAS solutions evaluated for this report.
• The state of cybersecure NAS solutions.
• Five common cybersecure NAS solution use cases.
• Available cybersecurity features on NAS solutions.
• Features common across all evaluated 10PB+ NAS solutions.
• Distinguishing features of the DCIG TOP 5 Cybersecure 10PB+ NAS Solutions.
• Differences between the DCIG TOP 5 Cybersecure 10PB+ NAS Solutions.
• A profile of each DCIG TOP 5 Cybersecure 10PB+ NAS solution that lists at least 3 ways each one distinguishes itself from the other solutions.