Software-Based Policy Enforcement and Unified File-Object Access Cut Infrastructure Costs While Accelerating AI and Analytics Projects
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 23, 2025 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Panzura today announced the latest version of the Panzura CloudFS hybrid cloud file platform, eliminating two critical barriers facing global enterprises—expensive regional storage silos required for compliance, and the inability to access files through modern artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics tools without duplicating data.
CloudFS 8.6 solves both challenges through new capabilities. File-level geofencing replaces expensive regional storage silos with software-based policy enforcement, while native Amazon S3 API compatibility unifies file and object access allowing SMB, NFS, and S3 users to work with the same dataset simultaneously and with instant consistency. This eliminates the need for duplicate regional storage deployments and separate file and object storage systems. IT and storage teams can now ensure data compliance while accelerating AI and analytics projects, tackling the estimated $3.1 trillion annual productivity loss from disparate data.
Regulatory requirements and data compliance laws are a persistent challenge for global organizations, often forcing them to use expensive, complex, isolated storage silos for different regions. Traditional solutions require separate physical storage infrastructure to meet geographic restrictions, multiplying costs and management complexity. Meanwhile, technologists must also choose between deploying separate storage systems for file-based workflows (SMB/NFS) and cloud-native applications (S3 object storage) or accepting suboptimal workflows. This dual fragmentation increases storage costs while creating operational silos that delay AI and analytics initiatives.
CloudFS geofencing addresses data compliance requirements through software policy rather than architectural duplication, while its S3 Interface enables cloud native workloads and traditional file users to share the same data without duplication or added infrastructure.
"Geofencing in CloudFS 8.6 represents an important milestone toward delivering comprehensive data sovereignty capabilities. Customers need trusted infrastructure that adapts to evolving regulatory landscapes while maintaining operational excellence. This release demonstrates our dedication to building the foundational tools that will define enterprise data management in the future," said Dan Waldschmidt, CEO, Panzura.
Traditional multi-cloud NAS solutions require separate storage instances per region to achieve geographic data compliance, and separate object storage tiers or protocol gateways to support S3 workloads, creating data duplication and synchronization delays. They require complicated configurations for multi-site deployments and lack the granular controls needed for strict data compliance, resulting in a complicated management experience and the inability to fully abstract the complexity of the underlying cloud infrastructure.
"The growth of unstructured data, coupled with complex multi-cloud environments, has made storage more challenging than ever. With CloudFS 8.6, we're eliminating the architectural compromises that force a choice between regional compliance and operational efficiency, and between file and object workflows. We're giving our customers the tools to simplify operations, enforce compliance, and bring enterprise-class simplicity to data storage," said Sundar Kanthadai, Chief Technology Officer, Panzura.
Geofencing Delivers Regulatory Compliance and Data Segmentation
CloudFS 8.6 introduces a new geofencing capability that allows administrators to define policies to identify specific files and folders. Once identified, access to this data is restricted based on the geographic location of the site, preventing unauthorized "cross-border" data access. Policy enforcement is applied instantly at the individual site level, preventing users from reading or writing protected content irrespective of their file system–level access or Active Directory (AD) permissions. These rules support pattern-based blocking, including specific file extensions, naming conventions, and directory paths.
"Global organizations face mounting pressure to comply with data residency regulations while maintaining operational efficiency. Panzura CloudFS geofencing capabilities change the game by allowing our customers to enforce geographic access controls. They can now ensure that sensitive data stays where it belongs without the cost and complexity of maintaining isolated regional storage systems—meeting compliance requirements while working smarter and faster," said David Park, Cloud Solutions Architect, Graitec Group.
Administrators can create geofencing rules that block individual files, entire folders, or files matching specific patterns such as spreadsheets in regulated data directories, files containing sensitive identifiers in their names, or documents with region-specific naming conventions. While folder structures and filenames remain visible for navigation, read and write operations are denied for protected content, maintaining usability while enforcing compliance.
Beyond compliance, geofencing enables operational segmentation, ensuring that teams in specific locations only access data relevant to their projects, reducing cross-region bandwidth consumption, and preventing inadvertent access to data outside their scope.
Native S3 Interface Unlocks File Data for AI and Analytics
The CloudFS S3 Interface provides native Amazon S3 compatibility with support for bucket management, object CRUD operations, and multipart uploads. It delivers simultaneous access to the same dataset via both file and object protocols with instant consistency across SMB, NFS, and S3.
Storage admins can now expose SMB directories as S3 buckets with AD-integrated Kerberos authentication, providing data teams with secure S3 access to file shares. AI frameworks like TensorFlow and PyTorch can access training datasets via S3 APIs while editors concurrently work on the same files via SMB without storage replication or synchronization overhead.
For example, creative teams working with large video files or researchers managing imaging datasets can access the same files via SMB or NFS, while AI pipelines, rendering engines, and analytics platforms access that identical data via S3 APIs with all changes visible instantly across all protocols.
This native S3 approach eliminates the file-to-object synchronization delays and storage duplication costs that plague traditional multi-cloud NAS architectures. Additionally, this dual-protocol access simplifies data lifecycle management and enables new operational efficiencies, such as using object-based tools for tasks like backup, archiving, and data tiering without needing to copy the data.
Enterprise-Scale Performance for Multi-Protocol Operations
- Instant geofencing policy enforcement across distributed sites with no synchronization delays
- File-level access control at scale—granular policy enforcement across millions of files without performance degradation
- Multiple shares per node for workload isolation and performance optimization
New Management and Governance Features
Beyond geofencing and the S3 Interface, CloudFS 8.6 delivers additional enterprise-grade capabilities that reduce administrative overhead for distributed deployments.
- Continuous Data Availability: Ensures continuous data availability during temporary node outages for planned downtime, maintenance, or disaster recovery, keeping workloads uninterrupted without the need for dedicated HA nodes.
- Grafana Dashboard Integration: Provides comprehensive, real-time visibility into system health, performance trends, and capacity planning through CloudFS time-series statistics database based on InfluxDB, enabling centralized monitoring and proactive troubleshooting within existing management dashboards.
- Quota Management with Enforcement: Prevent storage overruns and ensure fair resource allocation with automated user and group-level quotas that integrate with Active Directory, providing centralized control across globally distributed teams.
- System Management Audit Trail: Maintain complete compliance readiness with consolidated audit trails covering all system management activities across the entire deployment, supporting regulatory requirements and security investigations.
- End-to-End Microsoft Entra ID Support: Seamless integration with Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) enables single sign-on (SSO) and role-based access control (RBAC), allowing technologists to leverage their existing security infrastructure without re-architecture.
Why Traditional NAS Cannot Match CloudFS 8.6
CloudFS 8.6 delivers several key architectural advantages that competing solutions cannot match. The platform enforces access controls at the file and folder level, addressing data compliance requirements and eliminating the need for complex multi-region architectures or isolated storage instances. Competing solutions achieve geographic data compliance by deploying separate storage instances per region, multiplying infrastructure costs, and management complexity.
CloudFS's architecture and peer-to-peer real-time synchronization ensure immediate global data consistency across SMB, NFS, and S3 protocols simultaneously. This contrasts with serial syncs, file-locking mechanisms, and eventual consistency models that can introduce up to hours of delay. Competitors using hub-and-spoke architectures face fundamental synchronization delays because file and object access must be routed through central controllers.
Unlike traditional NAS platforms, CloudFS provides native S3 API compatibility. This eliminates storage duplication, reduces infrastructure complexity, and removes synchronization delays entirely. Traditional NAS platforms that claim S3 compatibility typically use protocol gateways that translate between file and object formats, introducing latency and limiting API support.
Moreover, CloudFS maintains consistent authentication and authorization through AD and Kerberos across SMB, NFS, and S3 access, eliminating separate credential stores and security silos common in multi-protocol solutions.
Delivering Business Value
Panzura CloudFS 8.6 empowers IT leaders to focus on strategic initiatives rather than day-to-day operational firefighting. Early customer deployments show infrastructure cost reductions by eliminating duplicate regional and object storage tiers, cutting WAN bandwidth consumption through intelligent caching, and reducing storage administration overhead through unified multi-protocol management.
Time-to-deployment for new AI and analytics initiatives can be accelerated by eliminating data migration delays, with data teams gaining immediate S3 access to existing file repositories without replication or ETL processes. CloudFS 8.6 is a strategic asset for technologists looking to simplify their hybrid and multi-cloud strategy, ensure data compliance, and unlock the full value of file data without the cost and complexity of maintaining separate storage systems for regional compliance and file and object workloads.
About Panzura
Panzura empowers modern enterprises to unlock the full potential of their unstructured data, aligning it with strategic business goals. Our solutions ensure data visibility, accessibility, and control, seamlessly preparing organizations for a digitally transformed, AI-driven future. With Panzura, organizations can enhance data resilience, optimize costs, and deliver data instantly to users and processes – anywhere, anytime. Discover how Panzura can drive your success at panzura.com.
Panzura is a trademark or registered trademark of Panzura LLC in the U.S. and/or other countries. All other trademarks, registered trademarks and/or logos are the property of their respective owners.
Media Contact
Thomas Morelli, Panzura, 1 2062183984, [email protected], https://www.panzura.com
SOURCE Panzura
Share this article