Network-attached storage (NAS) remains a critical part of an organization’s storage strategy, as Enterprise Strategy Group found that 61% of organizations have deployed NAS within their on-premises data centers, while 44% planned to accelerate their NAS spending over the next couple of years. This comes as no surprise, as we found that nearly half of survey respondents stated that their unstructured data will grow at least 40% or more annually.
As with any data growth, whether structured or unstructured, organizations must ensure that:
- Capacity can grow accordingly without needing to overprovision and without running out of space to ensure business continuity.
- End users can access any amount of data with minimal delay.
- Data is constantly protected against cyberattacks and ransomware.
- Data can be recovered with minimal or no loss (translating into minimized RTOs and RPOs).
- Addressing these challenges with legacy NAS platforms in highly distributed environments is likely to be difficult.