Case Study: The Field Museum achieves a scalable, protected digital record of life on Earth with Microsoft Azure

Preserving a digital record of life on Earth

The Field Museum, home to about 30 million specimens and artifacts and a major center for research and public education, launched a large‑scale digitization effort to make its collections available online. That effort produced a rapid “data explosion” of high‑resolution images, DNA sequencing and other file‑based data that outpaced its traditional SAN and tape/disk backup processes, creating unpredictable capacity needs and concerns about recovery time and data protection.

The museum implemented a hybrid solution using Nasuni Enterprise File Services with Microsoft Azure, connecting a Nasuni Edge appliance to Azure Blob storage via the UniFS file system to provide on‑prem performance with virtually unlimited cloud capacity, continuous versioning and instant recovery. The deployment sped file access, eliminated overprovisioning, shrank the datacenter footprint and improved RTO/RPO — delivering about 60% storage cost savings and up to 50% reduction in storage management time.

The Field Museum

Rob Zschernitz

Chief Technology Officer