“Once a new technology rolls over you, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road.”
Stewart Brand, Writer
As a long-time technology decision-maker for a cutting-edge digital agency, hardware and platform refreshes were always an exciting time to evaluate research and discuss with colleagues how industries like storage were providing more value to IT Departments, and to the workforces they are charged with empowering.
These windows offer an extremely valuable opportunity to not merely renew a solution but to introduce innovation to the company with the goal of reducing the complexity, time, and intellectual overhead of delivering quality products and services to our customers. To do this, it needs to turbo-charge collaboration, removing impediments to the seamless exchange of content and ideas so the brilliance of your people is magnified, not obscured.
Traditional on-premise infrastructure was always slow to move forward, to release new features, to re-think and evolve past the “how” to store and present files, and to provide true thought leadership into the “where and why”. This was always a source of impatience for me, as the opportunities for continuous improvement always eclipsed the pace of development.
Enter the SaaS era, and while limited in scope at first, gave a true opportunity to provide customers with a continuously evolving product that could keep up with the demand of faster-moving organizations that are locked in an infinite game of staying at the forefront of innovation. We’ve all seen examples of excellent value SaaS, and perhaps those that merely provide you with the same feature set as off-the-shelf but at a higher premium.
Why We Chose CTERA’s File and Object Storage Solution
Our decision to select CTERA in 2019 would prove to be a great example of the former. A file storage, synchronization, backup, and presentation technology that would give us the flexibility to choose our own best-of-breed cloud object storage, and best-of-breed hypervisor, avoiding the vendor lock-in that many other all-in-one solutions required a flexibility-stifling commitment to.
Even better, the evolution of the product was continuous as many customer-requested features made their way into the platform as their chief decision makers continuously evaluated “where is data going?” to get ahead of trends like analytics, ransomware protection, data tiering, and edge to cloud performance.
This new versatility would be put to the test almost immediately after deploying as the corporate world plunged into a work-from-home model overnight in March of 2020.
What was a use-case predicated on the speediness of local file-caching over a LAN device, required an immediate about-face to provide fast and secure file access over WAN to a distributed workforce. Without any impediment to efficiency or convenience, our organization was able to provide new, easy-to-use feature sets to employees eager to demonstrate their superior work-from-home capabilities and in servicing our clients with the grace and efficiency they were accustomed to.
Fast forward to 2023 and I find myself a part of the team that brought me this incredible technology, proudly serving customers as they undergo the same adventure I had undertaken myself a few years before.
From the inside, it’s easy to see why CTERA is as successful as it is. The passion of the development teams and the customer-centric focus of the services department, all culminate into a continuously evolving platform, always pushed forward by customer-driven innovation and the thought leadership of the Engineers that conceived the platform all those years ago.
It’s a tremendously exciting time in technology, and the opportunities available to deliver secure, powerful, resilient, and empowering solutions to your workforce are growing exponentially.
Choosing the Right File Service Solution Brings Value to Your Company
Never underestimate the value of the time you dedicate to researching and selecting the platforms that will bring the most value to your organization and be suspect of any single vendor’s ability to provide everything, everywhere, all at once.
Your value to your organization is measured by the culmination of the service you provide and the solutions you select, and I couldn’t be more grateful to the partners like CTERA that made such a substantial impact on our essential infrastructure.
If your company needs to continuously evolve (and it does), choose partners that not only facilitate that but promote it.
About the Author
Kyle is the former VP of Technology for the integrated branding agency, Glenn Davis Group, and a 25-year veteran of supporting technologies in media and creative environments. He joined CTERA as a Service Delivery Engineer in 2022 in pursuit of new challenges and experiences and is now responsible for the installation and post-sales support of CTERA Enterprise File Services. Kyle is passionate about both technology and people, and in empowering the most beneficial intersections between them.
