When you might need a NAS

Let’s start with something that isn’t a NAS, a server. If you’ve read some of our previous articles, or have worked with us, you will already know we try to find solutions that don’t involve a physical server. The traditional reasons for having a server, are mostly no longer applicable in 2022, due to the development, reliability and cost of Cloud services in their place.

One of the traditional reasons for having a server would be to use it to share files. With the emergence of Cloud services though, there is much less of an argument to store your files in a physical box in the office for most businesses. Indeed, the majority of our customers store their files in Cloud services.

As ever though, there are exceptions which need to be catered for. A couple of examples of these exceptions are having a vast amount of data (for argument’s sake, let’s say it’s multiple terabytes of data, rather than gigabytes), or having members of your team working from locations with poor Internet speeds.

In these examples, as much as Cloud services are our preferred solution, we know we’d have to look at exceptions, or perhaps a hybrid solution, using both technologies.

So, this brings us to a NAS – which stands for Network Attached Storage. This is basically a super basic File Server (just to be clear, it’s not a full-blown Windows Server as discussed above) which is used to simply store and share files.

In general terms, a NAS is cheaper to purchase than a Windows Server, is easier to maintain and there’s a strong argument that they’re more reliable.

As well as using a NAS to store files, you can remotely access the files using either a VPN service or an app (only certain NASs offer this).

There are also some really clever solutions that can be made use of, where you can have a primary NAS in an office for example, and you can have an exact copy of that NAS (which is updated every couple of hours) in a completely different location for backup purposes – for example, that could be located in a second sub-office, or in someone’s home. In the event of something happening to the primary NAS, that has taken it offline for a significant amount of time, you can switch over to the backup version quickly and easily, and off you go again.

One real-world example of where we’ve put a NAS solution in place is where the customer has some 3TB of data, with much of that being large video files. It just makes sense to use a NAS in this situation. Trying to synchronise those large files, and that volume of data to a Cloud service could be problematic, which we’d all be keen to avoid.

It’s all about reviewing, planning and even testing before landing on what the right solution might be for your scenario – a NAS could well be part of your solution.

Gavin Moorhouse is the owner of Lucid Computer Solutions, which advises and supports businesses in Worcestershire. Mostly it’s the Cloud, sometimes it’s a NAS.