Data Intelligence, AI, and the Future of File Services

A year ago, my team and I joined Nasuni to launch Access Anywhere and build out the platform’s data intelligence capabilities. Now that the Nasuni Access Anywhere solution has proven successful, and Nasuni has strengthened its platform with search and intelligent ransomware detection, I’m excited to embark on the next journey. I’m taking on a new role as Chief Innovation Officer to lead Nasuni’s data intelligence and Artificial Intelligence (AI) strategies. Let me next explain what this means for Nasuni as well as our current and future customers.

First, some history. I came onboard when Nasuni bought my company, Storage Made Easy (SME), and while a large part of that acquisition was centered on the technology that evolved into Nasuni Access Anywhere, we had quite a lot more under development at the time of acquisition. My broader mandate here at Nasuni has been to develop new offerings that prioritize the full lifecycle of file data, from creation and storage all the way through classification, search and interrogation. From now on, that means shaping the impact of AI and data intelligence on the Nasuni File Data Platform, our company, and our customers from an internal and external perspective. We will be empowering businesses with tools to really leverage the full potential of their many and often disparate datasets.

From a technical standpoint, let me start with AI. Obviously, Generative AI (GenAI) is what everyone is talking about right now, but what tends to get lost in all the hype and excitement is that the enterprise has a very particular set of needs along with a very high bar when it comes to introducing new technology An enterprise cannot metaphorically hand over the keys to the vault when deploying a large language model (LLM). The enterprise needs to ensure privacy, compliance, and strict controls over who or what has access to which datasets. IP needs to be protected. Companies need to vet LLM training data to avoid unknowingly exposing their organization to future copyright lawsuits. As we here at Nasuni evaluate and develop our AI product stream, these are the kinds of enterprise-specific concerns we’re prioritizing. There is a great deal to consider here, and our focus will be on developing AI tools and services that truly work for the enterprise-class customer.

The road to data intelligence is a little smoother and easier to envision. This was a core part of the product vision at my last company. We’ve been working on it for years, and we’re very excited to start realizing those product visions here at Nasuni.

There are many ways to augment data to provide greater data intelligence outside of GenAI, including narrow AI integrations and algorithms that can provide smart data correlations and insights that translate into real business value.

Nasuni is uniquely architected to help organizations take advantage of these increasingly sophisticated and powerful AI technologies. A file data platform that is able to manage, protect, curate, and scale on demand while still offering performance at the edge is a necessity for good integration into AI LLM models. This requires a software stack that encompasses each of these aspects by design. For AI to be fully adopted within an enterprise, the complexities of data architecture and management need to be thought through from end-to-end to make them as easy as possible for customers to use and adopt.

I can’t talk too much about what’s scheduled for release here at Nasuni, but suffice to say that we are going to make it easier for more users to find, use and interact with their Nasuni data.

Our larger vision is to knock down the silos of unstructured file data storage in favor of a unified cloud platform with powerful security and data intelligence tools. You’ll start to see enterprise content search, real-time PII (Personally Identifiable Information) content detection, and the integrations with cloud-based vertical AI services that we pioneered at SME. I’m excited about my new role, but I’m far more excited about what we’re building for our customers, and how Nasuni is going to change file data services in the years to come.