Climbing the Gartner Hype Cycle for Storage and Data Protection

The latest Gartner Hype Cycle report for Storage and Data Protection has just been published and I’m thrilled to see that

Hybrid Cloud Storage

is steadily progressing up the firm’s innovation curve. I’m even more excited that Nasuni is listed as a featured vendor. For those who don’t know, the Hype Cycle represents the maturity and adoption of emerging technologies through five phases. Hybrid Cloud is defined by Gartner as ‘enabling seamless data services among disparate data centers, edge and the public cloud infrastructure.’ The future of file storage and backup is consolidating in the cloud.

I’ve been working with Gartner for years, and despite the occasional rumblings from jilted vendors, I can say for certain that these reports (unlike youth sports tournaments) are not pay to play. You and your category have to earn your stars with Gartner, so it’s great to see that Gartner’s storage experts are recognizing the rise of hybrid cloud – and Nasuni’s ongoing run of success. We are in good company in this category with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and NetApp.

Additionally, it’s important to note that we actually operate in two different major categories in the Gartnerverse, but more on that in a minute.

Hybrid Cloud: A Tremendous Opportunity

What Gartner’s take on hybrid cloud storage and services means is that they believe this is a fast-moving, rapidly evolving segment. The firm scores the category “high” in terms of its benefits to businesses. Nasuni is continually adding more customers and bigger brand names, but there’s so much more business out there to be won.

Gartner first started covering this segment back in 2009. Back then, though, most technologies treated the cloud as a kind of dumping ground for infrequently accessed data. Today, the storage gateways of old are just about gone, and the leading solution providers are leveraging cloud to do more with data, from high-speed global file synchronization to data analytics.

The Ransomware Recovery Problem

One of the other drivers of the segment’s momentum is data protection — specifically, the ability of the hybrid cloud technologies to enhance disaster recovery by infinitely snapshotting data from different locations to the cloud. This, to me, is where this whole picture gets really interesting, and brings us back to that dual category point I mentioned above. In this report Gartner says, ‘By 2025, at least 75% of enterprises will face one or more ransomware attacks, representing at least a sevenfold level of incidence, compared with 2021.’

Nasuni is more than a storage company, and our snapshot-based Continuous File Versioning® technology gives companies an entirely new way of backing up and protecting their data. In our ransomware-plagued economy, our approach has proven to be incredibly enticing to large companies. As our founder Andres points out in a recent blog, ransomware has completely changed the conversation for us. Companies are starting to realize that merely protecting data isn’t enough. They need to have a solid plan in place to recover quickly from ransomware attacks and the traditional backup vendors cannot do the job for file servers in today’s environment.

Enterprises are looking for a new way to protect their data and their business, and we’re seeing an enormous uptick in interest for that very reason. Nasuni allows you to eliminate all the costs and hassles associated with backup and gives you a fast, reliable means of recovering from a ransomware attack – including the distributed attacks that leave large companies without access to their files for days.

Don’t Listen to Me

We’re proud to be cited alongside industry giants like Microsoft and Amazon, and we’re pretty happy overall with our standing in the world of Gartner customers right now. Over on Gartner’s peer review site, we’re currently scoring 4.8 out of 5 — and you can’t buy that kind of feedback, either. This is the highest of any other vendors in this category by a large margin. Here are a few recent quotes from customers:

“We do not have to worry about speed [or] space on the file servers, backups, or Disaster Recovery. Nasuni has figured it all out.”

“Clearly the future of Enterprise File Storage on Cloud. Doesn’t leave you tied with a cloud vendor, very versatile, modular and secure.”

“It is a wonderful tool, we no longer need to worry about backup and restore, and we can easily trace any changes.”

“The product works very well in managing our file storage needs and provides the ability to easily recover files.”

These are just the most recent reviews from the past few months. Check out a few more of the peer reviews of Nasuni – and reach out to us if you have any questions. The file storage and data protection industries are going through a major upheaval, and we’re excited to be one of the companies that’s driving the change.