Cloud-Based NAS Consolidation Solves Enterprise Data Sprawl

Published on October 26, 2023, this report was written by Todd Dorsey, senior storage analyst at Data Center Intelligence Group LLC (DCIG).

Cloud-Based NAS Consolidation Solves Enterprise Data Sprawl

The pace of data growth continues to accelerate. The latest numbers suggest WW annual growth rates of 23.71% from more devices and applications generating data, larger file sizes, and the use of media files such as images and video. For enterprises, the storage requirements are growing at an even faster pace of 42.2% annually. Processing, protecting, and copying data for various uses add to the storage requirements and management challenges.

Data growth entails expenses for hardware, software, management, and maintenance. It impacts data management strategies for maintaining performance, security, backup, recovery, archiving, and governance.

Problem of storage system proliferation
For many organizations, this rapid data growth has resulted in a proliferation of storage systems. The organic growth of NAS devices and file servers an organization adds over time for new locations, users, and applications further complicates data management. Organizations end up with a plethora of data silos without visibility into the file estate of its multiple underlying systems.

The data generated by distributed workforces and edge devices like video cameras further adds to the challenges. Industry studies suggest that by 2025, the edge will generate 75% of data outside the data center. For distributed workforces, IT organizations must maintain capacity, availability, backup, and DR plans for hundreds or even thousands of locations, often with different technologies. The pandemic has only exacerbated data management challenges as organizations deal with work-from-home employees, contractors, and remote talent whose data must be stored and protected.

You cannot manage what you cannot see
As a result of these dynamics, organizations are often faced with the reality of not knowing the what and where of their data across the organization. This gap in knowledge, in turn, complicates data governance, analysis, security, compliance, and planning, which in turn impacts costs. This gap impacts ransomware exposure, which certainly worries every CIO. Further, scattered and unknown file data undermines AI workloads, which require complete data for optimum success. At the end of the day, this lack of visibility into an organization’s data undermines IT’s mission of providing the technical resources the organization requires to achieve its goals.

Cloud-based NAS consolidation enables global data visibility
Cloud-based NAS consolidation, based on enterprise-class SDS, takes a different approach to handling the growing accumulation of unstructured data. It migrates file data from multiple file servers and NAS devices into a cloud-based storage platform. The best solutions provide fast, flexible, usable, managed access for all an organization’s end users to global file data while addressing the needs of costs, governance, compliance, security, analysis, and decision-making. Further, organizations can experience notable time and cost savings with cloud-based NAS consolidation, allowing IT staff to shift their attention to other activities that bring value to their organization.

DCIG identified 31 companies offering products meeting its definition of an SDS-based NAS consolidation solution.