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I will be the first to admit that end-of-year prediction articles have never been a favorite of mine. For the most part, they tend to pontificate on technology and business processes that are so far out of scope for the average company that they become downright laughable.

The world of post-production storage is constantly evolving—and as we approach 2022, its evolution continues in full force. There is, as always, the need for storage. But what does that mean in 2022? For instance, where should that storage reside? In a data center? In your data center? Is it accessible via the cloud? If so, how do you define the cloud?

Every day, we all see our respective data storage growing exponentially. And with that, there is only one outcome: spending more money. It’s this all-too-common reality that brings us to the ultimate question: why do I need data storage analytics?

As we quickly approach 2022 (yes, I said it—and yes, this year has flown by), there is one thing in all the constant madness of the past 18 months that hasn’t changed, and that’s the fact that production teams are still struggling with perpetual data growth.

The term BI is nothing new—it’s a decade-old throwback that hearkens to a simpler time, when people first discovered that the data created within business systems could be interpreted to make more informed business decisions. Now, as we round the end of the first half of 2021, what was once a nice-to-have is imperative to business success and as much a part of business as an ERP or CRM.

If the past year has taught us anything, it’s that marketing narratives drive us all up the proverbial wall. None is as horrible as the “new normal” phrase, thrown about with reckless abandon. Simply put, the concept of “new normal” is insulting. It means that, for reasons unbeknownst to all of us, we must now accept what 2020 and 2021 has done to our collective wellbeing, personal psyches, health, and global economy.

Doing what I do for a living, I have had the unique opportunity to peer under the hoods of a lot of companies across multiple industries. And whether it’s media and entertainment, sports, houses of worship or something else, the underlying theme never changes: data growth is affecting everyone.

All puns and cheesy social media article titles aside, network attached storage (NAS) is now a must-have for every serious, modern production company.

With overall data growing exponentially due to ever-increasing file sizes, the old-school approach of stacked-up hard drives and beefed-up workstations are no longer close to a viable solution.

More so, the result of ever-increasing data now collides with equally important business requirements—ensuring that seamless data access, data protection, and capacity and performance is a constant, never hampering productivity or profitability. So, it’s at this point you should be asking, “What can NAS do for me and my organization?”

Your data is threatened on many fronts, so it is critical you implement preventive measures.

It might surprise you to know that the top cause of data loss is not from the malicious activities of cyber criminals, but from natural disasters. From fire and flooding to earthquakes, natural disasters pose an enormous risk to your data and IT infrastructure.

What are the drivers of change in Store from your perspective?

Whereas the cost of fiber infrastructure has become prohibitively expensive, we have the cost of 25 and 100Gbit ethernet and NVMe decreasing rapidly. We have applications supporting high performance workflows using ethernet changing how content is edited at high speed. We have AI and other data analytics driving automated workflows, which call for single global namespaces and data movement to cloud. We have remote personnel driving change on how content is edited and accessed in parts of the workflow, where previously it was done on-premise only.