When the New York Times launched its first web presence, new CTO Andres Rodriguez faced a major challenge – how to scale web services from 10,000 internal users to millions of subscribers. Andres’ IT team could have purchased racks of web servers and load balancers. But building out The Times’ data center wouldn’t withstand the massive number of hits to its site when a major story broke.

Instead, Andres turned to Akamai, whose use of the internet to replicate and cache content globally provided scale a single enterprise couldn’t match. His early use of what is now considered a cloud service was a huge success.

As The Times began digitizing more of its content and production workflows, Andres soon encountered his next big challenge – how to store, protect, and manage the files that were doubling in size and number every year. He could have purchased racks of NetApp NAS devices, backup solutions, and disaster recovery infrastructure. But this hardware-based model could no longer support the magnitude of file growth.

A new file services approach uniting the performance and access of NetApp with the scalability, stability, and global reach of Akamai was needed. Andres’ idea for “NAS Unified” – Nasuni – was born.

Andres Rodriguez, founder, and CTO of Nasuni and former CTO of the New York Times joins me on my daily tech podcast to discuss what enterprises can do to ensure their data and cloud storage is AI-ready

Unstructured data is a growing source of value, but traditional ways of storing, sharing and protecting the data--especially across multiple locations--are not keeping up with the demand for lower cost, more efficient and smarter infrastructure.

Andres outlines steps organizations can take to harness unstructured data for new capabilities, including how to modernize your applications for high-performance while placing files and metadata correctly, so scaling will still be cost-effective.

Andres can also shares a few anecdotes on how global firms in engineering, architecture, construction, and other industries were able to take these steps to accelerate digital transformation.