Introducing Nasuni IQ: Unlocking Intelligence for Distributed File Data

Six months ago, Nasuni announced the appointment of Jim Liddle as Chief Innovation Officer for Data Intelligence and AI. As we’ve discussed previously, 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 and Jim has taken a strong leadership position in helping shape that vision. With today’s announcement around Nasuni IQ and our “Fit or AI” framework, we are delivering on that vision as well as setting the stage for continued insights and analytics innovation in data intelligence for enterprise.

We are excited to announce the availability of Nasuni IQ, a new core feature of the Nasuni File Data Platform, which provides centralized data intelligence for a company’s file data. Unstructured data continues to explode in the enterprise and AI is putting significant pressure to get this data under control. The Nasuni platform allows enterprises to consolidate all silos of storage into one central object store. Now with Nasuni IQ, customers can curate that data to get it AI ready.

Nasuni IQ consumes events from edge instances across your Nasuni infrastructure to build a centralized view of file and user activity. Rich audit data is combined with deep scans of file and folder attributes to extract intelligence from file data. The result is unprecedented visibility that enables better data management, security, and leverage of file data intelligence for enterprise.

Key Capabilities include:

• Activity Monitoring: Track detailed usage patterns across users, folders, shares, Edge instances, and time to identify trends, and anomalies.
• Data Discovery: Provide visibility into storage consumption, file types, file access distribution, and ownership. Pinpoint opportunities for storage savings, compliance risks, and data quality issues.
• Issue Resolution: Enable faster troubleshooting and problem resolution by providing storage admins and help desk teams with detailed visibility into user file activity. Quickly diagnose issues like running out of storage, potential data exfiltration, or performance issues by identifying usage trends on affected shares. Accelerate investigation of user-reported problems through granular historical activity data.
• AI-Readiness: Nasuni IQ can be used as a tool to prepare an organization’s data for AI through effective curation of file and unstructured data.

Performance, Scale & Ease of Use

Nasuni IQ is optimized for performance and scale and is purpose-built to scan Nasuni Edge instances with minimized overhead. Optimized algorithms only scan modified directories after initial indexes are built, making ongoing scans lightweight. This allows coverage of even the largest volumes with negligible performance impact.

Intuitive Grafana reports and pre–built dashboards provide visibility through easy-to-interpret graphs and trends.

Industry Use Cases

There are many use cases that can benefit from the activity monitoring offered by Nasuni IQ. Financial services firms can analyze file access patterns to detect suspicious activity and enforce need-to-know security policies. Media companies can glean insights into usage trends to optimize storage infrastructure for performance and costs, etc.

Data Intelligence & AI Readiness

As AI transforms data from a sunk cost to a valuable asset that needs to be harnessed, Nasuni is working to help customers turn their files into information streams that fuel growth. We have developed a ‘Fit for AI’ framework (which will be detailed in a subsequent post) to help companies manage this data transformation and Nasuni IQ can be leveraged during the critical curation phase of data readiness for AI workflows. It contributes an additional layer of observational data access patterns, user behavior, malformed data instances, and growth trends. This can augment the suite of tools used by data engineers to assess and refine data prior to developing and training AI models. In adding data intelligence for enterprise into the curation toolkit, companies will benefit from an amplified field of vision over distributed, dark data that might otherwise go unseen.

In summary, Nasuni IQ delivers the visibility required for large unstructured file data sets that grow exponentially day-on-day. By leveraging underutilized file metadata and audit data, and transforming this raw information into accessible, actionable data intelligence for enterprise, Nasuni IQ allows companies to optimize storage resources, strengthen security, and enhance the data curation phase of preparing data sets for use with AI.