Nasuni is the leading hybrid cloud storage solution.
We connected with Dalan Winbush, CIO at Nasuni, to learn about his background, his responsibilities, what drew him to Nasuni, and more.
In this video
Dalan answers:
- His Role and Responsibilities
- Dalan’s Background
- Details on his role
- What attracted Dalan to Nasuni
- How Nasuni is leveraging AI
- Advice for companies and their AI adoption
Video Transcript
Dalan Winbush, and I’m the CIO at Nasuni.
Here at Nasuni, we’re a unified data platform for enterprises that we help move to the cloud in their journey. And then we also help secure your data as well from a ransomware perspective, helping reduce IT spend and just effectively managing your unstructured data.
My background prior is kind of a mixed bag between large enterprise, small enterprise, you know, Fortune 5 to PE firms. I’ve primarily been in the tech industry. About 98% of my experience has been in that industry. I started out as, you know, probably strong telecom as an individual contributor, being an engineer across data, software engineering, network engineering, security. I would say I’m not a practitioner in either one of those, but I do have a lot of breadth around technology. And then from just a leadership perspective, I’ve started honing in a lot on the operations side on how to really drive operational efficiency, securing the environment, from again large enterprise perspective, and taking some of those learnings and driving some of those frameworks that we can scale down to smaller organizations such as Quickbase and also Nasuni as well.
I’m the CIO. What does that mean? That means that I own all internal technology, from a security perspective, the data that employees use, the resources that employees need to get access to do their jobs, and that’s all their systems, and then also the actual physical infrastructure and device to make sure that they have the right resources to do their job. And then on the other side of this is I own the AI internal strategy. You know, how do we best leverage AI across the organization and optimize our own business so that we can remove some of that gray work and work with less and do more? And I think that’s the narrative behind the AI usage.
Nasuni being in the data space today, I think is kind of a prime spot to really, you know, unstructured data is part of an AI story. And we’re seeing a huge influx on how do we actually leverage some of this data that may have not have been useful for us 10, 15 years ago. So being in the data space really led me to Nasuni. I do like the pace of hypergrowth, and I understand that we’re going through a transformation, and I want to be part of a transformation around a hypergrowth company around the data space as well.
We’re using AI across the organization. I would say right now in two different places. Number one, there’s a lot of opportunity where we’re seeing tremendous efficiency within the product development space. We have about 80 to 90% adoption and being able to produce more product faster code, better quality, even better secured quality product going out the door. The other side of the use is from the operations side, primarily around go-to-market and the G&A part of our business where we’re actually removing a lot of the administrative gray work that happens between those human connections, whether that’s with a recruiter or actually within the enterprise itself, working with IT case deflection and being able to self-serve internally as well. And there’s going to be a whole another host of use cases and workflows that we’ll be able to leverage, you know, from GenAI code creation all the way to agentics and actually having a digital assistant doing work on behalf of users.
I advise other organizations. I think there’s three parts to success or an AI success. One is connecting your enterprise. You have to connect the context of your whole enterprise, which means partnering with a solution that actually enables you to do that. The second one is attaching true value to an ROI or leading indicator that that particular use case or workflow that you’re optimizing leveraging AI is actually moving the needle, and that we’re not just throwing technology against the wall and just seeing what sticks, but actually having true ROI. And I think that the last piece of this is governance. AI is a very flexible technology that really aggregates information across your business. So having that governance around your data, number one, because AI is a data conversation, will enable you to securely and effectively distribute AI capability around your organization. So those are kind of the three pillars that I focus on and I focus on through other peer conversations as well.