To NAS or not to NAS?

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Is everyone ready for Network Attached Storage (NAS), especially SME’s?

Cloud storage has traditionally been focused on by the enterprise market. Big budgets and large IT departments have the skill sets and infrastructure as well as the expertise, to use these technologies.

Public cloud, on the other hand, has been where consumers manage their storage needs as they often do not need as much space and privacy as the enterprise. The small to medium enterprise sits in the middle – unable to take full advantage of the power of the private cloud due to its size and cost, and not entirely convinced of the security and scale of the public cloud.

Storage solutions

Network-attached storage (NAS) has evolved and now is attractive to this SME space, providing accessible, secure and localised cloud storage capacity to the market. These all-in-one servers are ideally suited to the business looking for ample storage and data protection solutions without the weighty personnel, infrastructure and tech investment previously needed.

NAS allows the SME to secure their digital assets and improve work efficiency in ways that suit their unique requirements. It’s customisable and flexible, so the hard wall of ‘either or’ is replaced with the adjustable agility of ‘anything you want’.

Cloud has been historically unapproachable to the SME. Solutions that they can trust have been priced out of their range, aimed at the big enterprise companies. The lower priced cloud offerings are handy and provide significant advantages, but rarely deliver on the compliance and regulation mandates that every business needs. An unexpected hack or leak on any one of these publicly available solutions could significantly compromise the SME’s reputation and future.

NAS neatly sidesteps this scenario and makes the cloud available for the SME with all the security, features and technology that more substantial businesses have enjoyed. Modern NAS solutions have backup solutions that protect against unpredictable disaster, human error, malicious deletion and unplanned data loss.

Back up solutions and more

The Synology NAS includes Desktop backup solutions that automatically backs up files from employee computers to an assigned destination on the NAS and helps recover data from a previous point in time. It also comes with Drive, an all-in-one portal for business files that makes for easy access with built-in security.

The Ponemon Institute found that small businesses paid around $690,000 to recover from a hack, and the US Cyber Security Alliance found that 60% of small businesses fail after a disaster, with this in mind, it seems that perhaps the NAS disaster recovery advantage is a mission critical one. From data mirroring to snapshot replication, NAS systems should include a variety of disaster recovery tools designed to ensure the SME is protected when a catastrophe happens.

The advantages of NAS are not all about security and disasters. The NAS also introduces the ubiquity of cloud collaboration and infrastructure. NAS has real-time collaboration and file sharing solutions embedded, all engineered for the business and designed to maximise efficiency in the workspace.

Virtual Storage

The Synology NAS delivers high-efficiency collaborative tools with real-time synchronisation of documents, spreadsheets and slides. With Drive, employees can access files via any platform, and share data across any operating system.

Also, the SME can also use the Synology NAS to create a virtual machine manager which allows the setup of various virtual machines. These can be located centrally to reduce IT costs and management resources and allow for the business to migrate virtual Disc Station Managers (DSM) instances from one NAS to another.

Joanne Weng | Sales Manager South Africa
Joanne Weng | Sales Manager South Africa

From the virtual machine and hyper-converged-like infrastructure benefits that are usually the domain of the enterprise alone to building a security centre and crafting a robust cloud infrastructure, NAS is the collaboration and ubiquity of cloud solution provider.

If you thought that the SME can’t have cloud storage? Now it’s time to think again.


Joanne Weng | Sales Manager South Africa | Synology |


 



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