Name: Modernising Non-Profit IT: How Microsoft Azure + Nasuni Help Organisations Do More with Less
Uploaded: 2025-11-19T13:00:59.235Z
Duration: 1 h
Description: Modernising Non-Profit IT: How Microsoft Azure + Nasuni Help Organisations Do More with Less

Transcript for "Modernising Non-Profit IT: How Microsoft Azure + Nasuni Help Organisations Do More with Less": Afternoon, everybody. Hello. Thank you for joining. We're gonna give it, I don't know, twenty, thirty seconds or so if you don't mind just while, some more people are filing into the room. So, yeah, thanks for your patience. Right let's kick off then. I'm conscious obviously that you've given up some of your lunchtime to join Kevin and I here today so thank you very much for joining. Today Kevin and I are going to be discussing the world of data management in nonprofits specifically, how both Microsoft and Nasuni together are helping organizations like yours to essentially be doing more with less. So in terms of the agenda today we're going to be discussing a bit about some of the Microsoft programs that can assist you in this space and how Nasuni as a partner addresses some of the concerns within your space around scale, performance, cost management, implementing an AI strategy, and essentially providing a data foundation for your growth over the years. So, yeah, we'll be discussing that in terms of content. Kevin will also be discussing some of the Azure XLR8 program towards the end of the session and we've also reserved some time for a Q and A. So as Kevin and I are going, as we're yapping away, please feel free to start thinking about questions. We'll hopefully get round to answering those at at the end of the session we've got ten minutes or so booked out. So that's it, half an hour with Kevin and I today. So let's kick things off by way of a brief introduction. I'm Harry Cordagill, one of the account executives here at Nasuni with a focus on nonprofit and research within The UK and I market. In terms of who Nasuni are and what we do we'll come into in a bit more depth and detail but we're essentially a file data management platform helping organizations to store, manage, protect and collaborate on file data at any scale. So that's me, and I'll hand over to Kevin now. Fantastic. Thank you very much, Harry. So my name is Kevin. I'm what we call a cloud and AI platform specialist. We're looking after all things related to Azure for customers. So whether that be storage, data, or AI. So, obviously, this is a great, session to to cover the broad breadth that we we would cover. And I essentially help customers with understanding the strategy road map, you know, and and access to programs and and all those good things to to support customers. I work within our Elevate organization, so specifically looking after nonprofits and charities, within The UK space. And with that, I think we'll we'll we'll hop into who is Elevate. A lot of customers may be familiar with, the the the the naming of the organization historically, so Tech for Social Impacts. We've now changed and and modernized into, what we call Microsoft Elevate. This is predominantly from bringing in our education arm of the organization. So, previously, Tech for Social Impact really just looked after nonprofits and charities. But now with Microsoft Elevate, we've also brought in the education part of the organization. And this really speaks to our strategy to assist organizations across the planet with doing more and specifically focused on leveraging AI to to really help address, you know, growing skills gaps and also helping organizations be competitive and and really take advantage of technology in their organizations. So really looking for, helping the the education part of the organization with AI skills and platforms and capabilities and then continuing to support our nonprofits and charities, as we have in the past. So what does that actually look like from, you know, some of the support? And, you know, this might not be news to everyone with us today, but we just wanna touch on it and make sure that organizations are leveraging all the benefits that they get as being part of Microsoft Elevate. So, really, what we try and do from, an organization point of view is support with a number of areas. So starting in the top right, so grants and donations. So customers that are, in the nonprofit space and go through the nonprofit validation get access to Azure grants, for example. So there, we would give a a payment once a month once a year in terms of Azure grants and credits that they can then use to obviously leverage technology to support the organizations. And what we also then do is support with specific types of technology or platforms to help accelerate and and deliver on on their goals and missions. So So if you think, for example, later on this year, we'll be launching, fabric for fundraising. So that's specifically technology for organizations and nonprofit space that focus on raising funds, you know, through membership or, obviously, outreach programs. And we've specifically got accelerators to help with those nonprofits. And then industry innovation, looking at how we accelerate things like blood testing or research or anything like that for those organizations. And we have a very strong, offering for, skills investment. So specifically looking at things like our enterprise skills investments or how we help organizations skill up internal resources, to develop and and build that future workforce for us. And then one of the things that we're obviously very strong, so our organization, Microsoft Elevate, sits within our, CELO organization, so corporate and legal affairs. And that gives us a direct feed into how we drive and influence public policy. So whether that be driving things like NIST two within the Netherland space, for managing and securing public information or even the AI act that, you know, our our chief and leader, Brad Smith, has been heavily involved in. So we do a lot of, you know, public advocacy and and policy engagement as part of the Elevate organization. So that's just a little bit about who we are. If you if all of this sounds new to yourselves, please feel free to either reach out to myself or to your broader account team to understand how you get access to some of these programs and benefits and where we could where we could assist yourselves as an organization. That's a little bit about who we are. And I think with that, I'll I'll hand over to yourself there, Harry, to take us through who Nasuni is. Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you, Kevin. So picking up on a point you made, then around around how to get in contact with us. We'll be following up after this session with contact details. So if any of this resonates and hopefully it does either around the programs that Microsoft offer to nonprofits or indeed Nasuni's technology and how we help nonprofits like yours with managing data growth in a cost effective, well governed, and secure fashion, then, yeah, please do get in contact and we'll be happy to go into some more depth with you. So first and foremost, I won't spend too long here, but I think it is helpful to set the scene as to as to who Nasuni are, where we've come from. I appreciate we're not a household name just yet, but I think this sets into context some of the challenges, that we see in your sector and how we help to address those. So I mentioned at the top of the webinar that we're a file data platform which I appreciate can sound quite dry on the face of things and let me paint some color as to the impact that looking at a hybrid cloud specifically file data platform can have on organizations, such as yours. Be it from the operational perspective, from the bottom line, be it from a security and governance perspective because, the impacts are wide reaching. So, we're not new kid on the block. We've been around since 2008 or so at this point as in GA and have been partnered with Microsoft for that period. We've worked with Microsoft to deliver migration of, you know, it's in the hundreds of petabytes now into the Azure cloud platform and about 70% or so of our customers trust Microsoft on the back end for their storage with Nasuni file platform sat on top. So an ISV available on the Azure Marketplace and with that comes some benefits as to how you consume Nasuni and the commercial impact. You can draw down a Microsoft Azure consumption commitment for example by purchasing Nasuni through the marketplace. Fundamentally, what what we do though is help organizations like yours to to really modernize and migrate off what we'd consider legacy infrastructure for managing file data. Right? So you think about the towers of infrastructure you have today when it comes to file, distributed file servers, NAS, perhaps some data in SharePoint that's starting to accrue some overages, and then all of the backup, the Doctor, the monitoring, the analytics, everything that hangs off the back of that primary storage. It's a lot to manage. So the point of Nasuni is to is to set that data free essentially, put it towards better use, help it to inform your AI initiatives by breaking down those silos of infrastructure and giving you a more flexible data foundation is probably the best way to to frame it. So yeah, GA since 2008 at this point widely deployed across the world and plenty within the nonprofit space be it research institutions, be it libraries, be it museums. We'll come on to some customer stories later to give this a bit more color. So what are the challenges that we're solving? I've I've mentioned that the Nasuni file platform offers you scale, it offers you performance, it offers you cost control and security. How do we how do we do this? Well fundamentally by helping customers move away from this web of infrastructure that you can you can see there. There's never been more stress, I think, or pressure on an IT team up until this point. We're asking infrastructure to deliver quite frankly things it was never designed to when we look at file servers and NAS for example. You're going to have the c suite perhaps, you're going to have director and leadership asking you about implementing AI initiatives, you're going to be dealing with data sprawl, a lot of you will be a grant led business, scientists and researchers are famously perhaps not that adept at projecting what sort of demand they might need from a storage perspective. So I quite frequently see organizations that will win a grant, they'll win some funding, they'll start doing their work, and then IT have to respond within days, hours, weeks to provision, an appropriate amount of storage for them. Budgets aren't going anywhere, north, generally speaking, as I'm sure you'll all have gone through the pain of of budgets for next year, quite recently. So we're being asked to do more with less whilst still growing that physical infrastructure on prem. So this leaves us at a at a bit of a crossroads, really. We either continue as we are from an infrastructure perspective or we start to embrace some of the cloud operating models that, you know, Kevin can help you with from an Azure perspective and some of the newer breed of of of SaaS vendors coming around. We want to be looking at kind of consumption driven models. We don't want to be looking at managing infrastructure underneath the data. The data's the value, the managing of the infrastructure is sucking up time, it's sucking up resources and cost. We want that data to be in an AI ready state. You might not be looking at, I don't know, some organization wide massive AI deployment at the moment, but it's important to start thinking about what a healthy data strategy looks like to respond to to to request from the business in in in that regard. It needs to be scalable. We need to break down silos of resource that prevent a single source of truth that the AI needs. We need to be proactive and positive in in our threat detection. We all know the the risks, unfortunately that are inherent within your industry, within non profit, and we've seen some of that spill out into the news. So we need to be positive about being able to identify threats to your data, to be able to mitigate that, to be able to respond and recover in a timely fashion. And try doing that today on on some of the infrastructure that that I've that I've spoken about. It's it's tricky and it leads to to gaps in capability. So where does Nasuni fit into this? Why why are we different? Nasuni is a unified file data platform, and by that I mean we consolidate all of these different functions of what were previously different towers of infrastructure. You might have, as I mentioned earlier, some SharePoint, which is a fantastic place for for working on Microsoft Office files and formats, but perhaps not for other different types of documents. I don't know. Genetic research, CAD, CAM, rich media, you quickly get into some issues around data protection and the cost of overage. So that's one tower. You've got SAN, you've got file server, you've got backup, you've got Doctor. Nasuni unifies all of this into one cloud backed Viledata platform. We're able to do this through our our cloud, our hybrid cloud design, unify all of that storage in cheap deep resilient Azure Blob object storage, but present that then in a format that users and apps are used to as SMB, SIFs for example. We accelerate the performance or rather give users that LAN like performance through our caching at the edge. So hot data is always kept close to users and apps regardless of the fact that the main gold copy of that data sits in Azure. So this is why we're able to build a really scalable model essentially for your data platform. Just keep what's hot wherever it's needed and and get the benefit of the resilience and uptime of Azure on the back end. Now I have I have cleared this with with Kevin. You'll see that AWS and and Google Cloud feature on this slide. That's by design. We are in a a world where you will be consuming some services from from other cloud providers. That's that's not news. Right? And so it's about being able to keep your data where it sits best. So we're able to bring together different buckets of your storage across different cloud providers but provide you with a common management plane over the top, that unified file data service. We complement that with some of our backup technology, our immutable versioning, ransomware protection, analytics. We're a fully featured multi cloud file data platform. I think I've got ahead of myself there and covered all of that slide already. So quickly I'll run you through a few stories before I hand back to Kevin. Some of you may have joined from from museums. I did see a few of you on on the registration list. So the Field Museum is a natural history museum based out of Chicago. They were looking to digitally archive 30,000,000 items or digitize 30,000,000 items from their archive. Also they had some research activities around genomic sequencing of endangered species and as I mentioned earlier they were struggling with the unpredictable nature of growth, lumpy file growth due to winning grants, working on projects, and really struggling with scaling, managing on prem infrastructure, with that in mind in a timely fashion. So Nasuni helped them to move that data into Microsoft Azure quickly, offering them on demand scale, granular and ransomware protected data recovery options, and ultimately help them save 50% on management time per week and also a 60% total cost of ownership saving. So in addition to all of this functionality we're providing we are out there in the real world helping customers to avoid chunky capex refresh on servers, storage, and providing a better total cost of ownership. We can help you build out that business case. I've got an eye on the time so I think we might skip through a few of these but Macmillan just very briefly a very similar use case. This was around reducing the, the, the the the difference different data centers they had, hardware within them, and the complexity that that was offering them or preventing them from moving to Azure nice and easily. So, I've got an ArmaTime as I've said so finally on the State Library of Queensland they were looking to improve their data protection. Lots of different files spread across three different locations, they weren't they weren't, I guess confident in their ability to detect and recover from ransomware in a timely fashion. So we helped them move into one unified data platform, cut recovery point objectives down to five minutes through our versioning of our immutable snapshots and offer them some proactive ransomware detection. Also they're better able to plan for the future. Suny offers you some analytics tools to help you project how your data might grow, who's accessing it, when was it last accessed, and give you some some deep granular file system monitoring capabilities. So plenty of challenges solved across hopefully some relevant case studies for you there and obviously look happy to to talk to you in more detail about your organization and and your challenges. So with that, I'm going to hand back to Kevin now to talk through the Accelerate program. Fantastic. Thank you, Harry. One of the things that we wanted to show, obviously, is, you know, Nasuni with a platform and the capabilities that they're able to do can really help organizations reducing their management, the overhead, and and and operational requirements, for their existing, datasets. The important things for us, though, is how does the Microsoft and Nasuni partnership come together? Well, there are certain programs that we have that can support organizations worth taking on, something like the Nasuni platform. So there's a number of different areas you can see here on the screen. So for example, we've got, specific partners and even our, own internal cloud acceleration factory that can actually assist with driving, driving those projects and capabilities and provide some of that, expertise, in crafting the architecture and the migration road map. And then what we also have is investment capability. So for an organization that wants to potentially do a POC or even do a full fledged migration, with Nasuni, we're able to fund a portion or a part of that exercise for for the organization. And then we also have what we call our guided engagements. So that would be whether you wanna do an assessment of the environment. Can it support migrating into cloud? You know, technically, is it possible? And then, like I said, doing something like a POV, or full implementation. We've got those capabilities available. And then just underpinning that would be also, you know, our tools and platforms, so things like Azure Migrate to do assessments of the environment and understand, cloud readiness, and then also our technical skilling that I mentioned at the top of the session. So really looking at how do we enable customers to upskill themselves in partnership with partners and and vendors like Nasuni, to drive that self capability and self reliance, for their platform and services. So this really encompasses how we're able to partner with an organization like Nasuni to bring in those, capabilities and digital transformation for for organizations. What that actually looks like in terms of two different phases. So as I mentioned, if an organization was looking at something like how do we, know what that architecture is gonna look like, do assessments on the environment, and understand use cases and what can and can't move into cloud. You know, obviously, organizations might have multiple datasets, whether you're looking at research or just, obviously, archive data for CRM systems or or platforms or file shares. We can run different, assessments and and and, use case scenarios for that. So really looking at building out that road map for yourself. We've got activities that can be done for supporting that. But then the actual implementation. So if organizations are new to cloud, they don't really have a footprint or or a platform for us to migrate that data in, we can then assist with actually building out that landing zone. So covering off some of the basics, so looking at things like Azure policy or governance to make sure that obviously the data that is migrated is secure, is is protected, and follows whatever the relevant compliance requirements would be. So if you're dealing with sensitive patient information, making sure that it applies to things like NIST two in Netherlands, for example. Otherwise, applying to, like, local governance regulations, so things like GDPR, for example. And then the other area that we assess from from an implementation point would actually do be that migration. So getting Nasuni and their team in to actually migrate some of those workloads and and and datasets into into Azure in a safe and and secure manner. So this is really where you can see, you know, Microsoft partnership with Nasuni coming to the to the front and driving some of that, you know, design thinking and also execution into those projects and and programs. With that, what we wanted to do was leave some time just to to go through q and a. We do recognize that there was a little bit of a mix up in terms of the the timing for the webinar. It was originally sent out for one hour. It was only a thirty minutes, so so we recognize that maybe your calendar invite has a slightly different time to the session. But one of the things that we wanna do was put a little bit of time aside in terms of q and a. If you would like to respond in terms of the q and a, you'll see in the top right hand side, there'll be a little q and a section. You can feel free to to punch any questions into there. Myself and Harry are here to to support, and we've also got a team in the back end that can help with any, technical queries if needed. So this would be your opportunity to ask anything around potentially integration capabilities, hybrid support, any form of understanding of the programs, how the funding, or anything like that would would work. Looks like we've, yeah, got the first one come in there. So, yeah, I'm job by my colleague, Radek as well, solution architect at at Nasuni. Yeah. Just joining us joining the stage now to so no no question, too small or too large. What capabilities does the Nasuni management console offer for monitoring, and automation? Maybe I'll I'll give a brief answer to that and, Radhik, you can expand on on that if you wish. So, I mentioned that we're a unified file data platform. Nasuni does offer some functionality called Nasuni IQ, around monitoring the file system health. There are ramifications of that when it comes to ransomware detection. You can see, yeah, activity within the file system, what's been going on there, and also activity by user as well, which might be of use. It's also useful for for managing capacity and scale, and forecasting that out over time, so there's that. There's there's definitely a certain amount of automation within the platform just in the way that you, an improvement over the way that you manage server storage file data today perhaps. The very nature of having disaster recovery and also data protection in the form of backup integrated within what's essentially your your core storage system brings a lot to the table in terms of reducing management time. You think about the RPOs that are provided of every five minutes, that's being done automatically. There's there's no more kind of daily backup and manual restores that you have to do from a third party vendor system. That's all managed within the Nasuni file platform. Anything to add to that, Radek? Yeah. Sure. Just, you know, making a step back and for to to to explain that, you know, Nasuni management console is is truly a single pane of glass point where you would manage your entire infrastructure. Just to remind you, Nasuni is a global file system, so You can access your data from anywhere around the world. You may have multiple so called Edge locations and Nasuni Edge appliances for local caching. You can utilize multiple Clouds or Clouds regions, yet you have a single management interface to manage the entire environment. That's really important. That simplifies the overhead associated with managing a storage platform. Great. Thanks, Radek. And whilst you're talking then, it looks like another one came in. good. Specifically around around cost, which is obviously top of mind for for a lot of people, our leadership is focused on reducing IT cost. What kind of ROI, return on investment, are Nasuni customers actually seeing. This is a core core part of our engagement with customers helping you to prove that Nasuni value back to the business, so willing to help you prepare kind of estimated business impacts and total cost of ownership analysis, that's that's what we work through, in our presales process. Specifically, in answer to your question, I mentioned, the Field Natural History Museum earlier. That's a 60% odd saving and it comes from a few places really. If you remember from the slide I put together the different tiers of infrastructure that go into storing, protecting, sharing file data today. There are a lot of vendors there when you put them all together. There's also a lot of significant amount of CapEx spend, and, yeah. So Nasuni bringing that together in on under one roof and also using pretty cost effective object storage. Remember it's as your blob on on the back end is a pretty pretty compelling TCO. So one vendor consolidation and and two really our architecture. Store your data in some of the the lowest cost tiers of cloud storage and just use some of your premium disk, for caching hot data only when it's needed, so helping you do more with less. Fantastic. I think there's a question around how does Nasuni integrate with Microsoft Azure and other cloud platforms for hybrid deployments. Radhak, I think probably best for you for you on that one. Sure. Yeah. Absolutely. So, again, to reiterate, Nasuni file data platform utilizes object storage at the back end. And and, in all honesty, we are absolutely cloud agnostic. The majority of our customer base tends to utilize Azure at the back end. So what what that means with with our capabilities, with our software sitting in between, we are consuming or we are enable enabling the customer to utilize object storage in a really easy way. Meaning that what they see at the front end, what the end users see is a file share. However, at the back end, we are connecting to in a context of Microsoft Azure, it will be Azure Blob. It is as simple as that. We talk a lot about Edge locations as well. It's good to mention now that we support deployment of our Edge Appliances not only on prem but also in the Cloud. Of course, caching tends to be the most efficient when it sits close to the users. However, there are certain situations, circumstances where there are some small offices without any infrastructure whatsoever, and it just makes sense to deploy the Azure appliance in the Azure region, which is relatively close to those end users. These are like two most important points of integration. Thank you very much. And it does look like those were all the questions that we had come through. I think as mentioned in the beginning, between myself and and Harry, if anything that you've seen here today is of interest, please feel free to reach out. You will obviously get a copy of the recording, from from ourselves. So we would really like to hear from you if there was anything that you heard today that was very really of interest. I think just from my side, I wanna thank Nasuni for the opportunity to join and and and have a little session and talk through our partnership and what we can do together to support customers in in migrating some of that data and securing and and optimizing their operations and and management. So thank you to to Harry and and Riddick for for letting me join. Likewise. Thank you, and, yeah, thanks to everybody else for joining. Looking forward to talking about, yeah, your organization in some more detail, where we might be able to help, but we'll leave it there for today. Awesome. Thank. you everyone for taking some of your lunchtime and joining us. Appreciate it. Thanks, everyone. Thank you. Bye now. Enjoy the rest of your day. Bye bye.