25 August 2021

Macmillan Cancer Support, one of the largest British charities, has moved its file storage from traditional hardware into the cloud.

Its 1,500 employees can now access standardised information without the need for replication of workflow data, thanks to cloud storage provider, Nasuni.

Previously, the cancer charity’s IT team relied on a time-consuming data recovery approach that involved replicating backups to a second London data centre.

Unstructured data now scales in the Azure Blog Storage, while Nasuni Edge appliances cache frequently accessed files locally, maintaining fast access for Macmillan’s end users.

Using Nasuni Continuous File Versioning has eliminated the need for additional backup and makes it easier to recover lost files. The IT team also uses Nasuni Management Console to control and monitor its infrastructure remotely.

“By moving to Nasuni, we consolidated our two main file shares in London and avoided the expense of refreshing the ageing file server infrastructure at our satellite offices,” said Tom Steven, Macmillan server engineer. “At the start of the pandemic, we were scrambling to get people working from home as quickly as possible. With Nasuni being in the cloud, and us just having an edge cache in each location, all we had to do was get people onto our VPN and redirect them to Nasuni for their file shares.

“It was very smooth. Nasuni has played a key part in our larger strategic shift to becoming a more agile, cloudfirst organisation.”

Andres Rodriguez, founder and chief technology officer at Nasuni, added that the business continuity risks and costs associated with operating and maintaining Windows File Servers have caused enterprises to seek low-impact approaches to file storage and disaster recovery.

“Coupled with cloud object storage like Azure Blob, Nasuni has made it easier for data-intensive organisations like Macmillan to store, protect, synchronise and access file data from anywhere in the world,” he said.