Jory MacKay

Jory is a writer, content strategist and award-winning editor of the Unsplash Book. He contributes to Inc., Fast Company, Quartz, and more.

October 09, 2018 · 11 min read

Feature Prioritization: 7 Ways to Prioritize Features and Product Improvements

Few companies fail because of a lack of good ideas. But choosing the wrong idea? That can sink your ship faster than an iceberg on a dark night. In fact, according to CB Insights, the #1 reason startups fail is because they built the wrong thing and there’s no market need for it.

But it’s not like you can sit back and not choose a feature or product to build. Choosing the right features to build means prioritizing from your long list of good ideas for what’s most important, realistic, and urgent now. It’s no small feat. And most project managers will agree that the most difficult part of their job is deciding which features deserve the team’s limited time, resources, money, and energy.

In this guide, we’re going to run you through all the many factors that get in the way of feature prioritization, and then round up some of the best strategies for how to actually prioritize features in the best way possible.

Before we dive in, here's how this article is structured:

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Feature prioritization starts with a shared vision and purpose

One of the hardest parts about prioritizing features is that they aren’t just product decisions. They’re personal ones. Every single feature, angle, approach, and idea reflects someone’s hard work and opinion. And this only gets even more complicated when you’re dealing with stakeholders with different levels of investment and control over a project.

It might not be that difficult to put off Jeff the UX designer’s idea for a different onboarding flow. But how can you de-prioritize Sally the CEO’s suggestion that you move to a different framework?

However, to be successful, prioritization can’t be personal. You’re not picking someone’s idea over someone else’s idea. You’re choosing the right feature for your company’s strategy and goals.

As Richard Banfield, author of “Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams”, writes:

The big picture—strategy and company goals—needs to be clear before you can debate the merits of each feature. Otherwise it’s like arguing whether to take a car or a boat when you don’t even know where you’re travelling to.

However, while feature prioritization starts with a shared vision, that’s not where it ends.

Stalemates and decision deadlock happen even if you’re all agreed on a shared vision. When you’re prioritizing features, you need to act as a collaborative leader—a role the Harvard Business Review describes as “[leaders with] the capacity to engage people and groups outside one’s formal control and inspire them to work toward common goals — despite difference in convictions, cultural values and operating norms.”

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As necessary and just plain right it is to treat everyone on your team as equals, they can’t have equal say in what features get prioritized. Because how can they? Yes, you’re working with good, smart people. But not everyone has the context needed to make major product decisions.

As Mina Radhakrishnan, the first Head of Product at Uber says:

A few other ways not to prioritize features

Alright. So we already know that prioritization requires a shared company vision. And we also know that it requires someone to make tough choices and stop the deadlock of “designing by committee.” But before we can get into the practical methods for feature prioritization, there are a few more red flags to look out for:

• Gut Reactions: We’ve all had people push their agenda because of some recent personal experience. Maybe your CEO logged in and saw something they didn’t like or got negative feedback from an investor. While it’s easy to jump on those as obvious priorities, those experiences should always be backed up by data or user research before given resources and time.
• Sales & Support requests (aka the loudest people at the table): When the people on the frontlines of your company are hearing complaints, they’ll tell you. Again, while this can be a powerful way to find features to prioritize, you want to make choices based on trends. Not individual requests. Do the due diligence to see if this is your ideal customer and that it’s a valid request before you let them interrupt your roadmap.
• Isolated feature ROI: It’s hard to say no to more revenue. Yet not every short-term, money-making feature is good for your company in the long term. Income doesn’t always equal a better user experience, and in the long run, happier customers are what will bring you the most success.

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7 practical ways to prioritize features

With all the fear mongering out of the way, let’s get back into the fun part of feature prioritization.

Because while this is a big decision, it’s also an exciting one. You’re choosing the future path of your product and helping pick features you know your customers will love and that will help the company grow.

Let’s start with a quick recap: We know we need data and trends to back up our beliefs. We know we need to tie our priorities to larger company strategies and avoid personal bias. And we know we need to not fall victim to short-term thinking.

But in most cases, this will still leave you with a ton of great features to pick from. So how do you know which ones to focus on now?

Luckily, there are some incredibly smart and easy strategies for diving deep into product decisions and help you prioritize features, improvements, and ideas.

1. Place features into themes to avoid choice paralysis

Before you dive right into prioritizing individual features, you need to break them up into smaller groups. Choice paralysis is a real issue when it comes to picking projects to work on. And one of the easiest ways to avoid it is to use feature “themes”.

Themes are groups of features that align with a company goal, product vision, or overall strategy. They help you make sure you’re working on the types of features that are most important right now, while also avoiding the issues of too many options. (Remember, saying no to a feature or update doesn’t mean abandoning it forever. You’re simply choosing where to place your efforts right now.)

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There are a few ways you can approach themes for your features:

1. Product Roadmap themes: Your product roadmap probably is already broken up into high-level themes like “Reporting”, “Integrations”, “Communication”, “Workflow”, etc… One of the simplest ways to break up new features is to group them by these established themes. This way, you know they’re working towards specific parts of your product and your strategy.
2. Metric movers, customer requests, and delight: Another option is to group features by where they came from and their potential impact. To do this, Greylock partner Adam Nash suggests using three specific buckets: Metric Movers for features tied to specific business needs; Customer requests for features your users actively ask for; and Customer delights for features that aren’t being asked for, but that you think your users would love. Features can fall into multiple buckets, but a healthy roadmap prioritizes options from all three.
3. Specific, metric-tied themes: Lastly, if you’re super clear on what metrics need to be moved, it can be good to create themes that are specifically tied to them. This could mean categories like: “Reducing churn by increasing engagement” or “Increasing sign-up to purchase conversions”. This way, your priorities are tied to specific needs and you know what success will look like.

Whichever method you choose, being able to look at higher-level feature categories is a great first step. (Decision trees are also a popular decision making and prioritization framework you might want to try here.) Next, you need to prioritize the themes themselves, and then finally, the features within them.

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2. Break down product features by feasibility, desirability, and viability

If personal biases and recency can lead us astray, then one of the first things you want to do is to look at your features through a more objective lens. Namely, that means looking at each one based on a few criteria and talking to specific members of your team:

1. Feasibility: How technically possible is the feature given the resources and tools you currently have? Talk to your technical team members—back-end engineers, UI designers, and front-end developers—to understand what can be done (vs. what’s impossible or highly improbable).
2. Desirability: Do your customers actually want it? Use every available tool to understand whether this is something your users desire. That means talking to researchers, UX designers, marketers, and support, as well as going through any users tests and validation you may have already completed.
3. Viability: How does this feature relate to or support your overall strategy and the requirements of the market? Talk to relevant executives and other product managers to understand how this feature works in a bigger ecosystem—both your own (other features, strategies, and goals) and the industry as a whole (regulations, legal issues, financials).

While these criteria come from individuals’ opinions, cross-examining them through multiple lenses helps keep everything objective. And of course, bringing in any supporting or complementary data can keep you extra honest as your go through this exercise.

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3. Score options on an Effort/Impact scale

With your features more or less mapped out and validated, it’s time to look at which ones are most important to work on first. A basic and commonly used way to do this is to plot them on a simple Effort/Impact matrix.

This is just a 2x2 grid, where each square represents a different level of effort to build the feature and the potential impact it will have:

Source: https://pabial.wordpress.com/2014/02/18/using-the-impacteffort-matrix-for-decision-making/

The goal is to find the features that will have the highest impact with the lowest effort. However, it’s not always easy to know where a feature fits on the matrix.

Design agency AJ&Smart suggests doing this as a team exercise. Write down each feature idea on a sticky note and then draw your matrix on a whiteboard. Gather a diverse group of teammates and then one at a time, take each sticky note, explain it, and let the team vote on how much effort it will take and then the potential impact from it.

You’ll still have final say on what features get prioritized. But this exercise helps you quickly gather input from a diverse group of people on your team.

4. Go deeper with the RICE Method

Sometimes features are complicated and need to be prioritized with more detail than a simple grid can do. In this case, the RICE method is a great way to score priorities. As Sean McBride, product manager at Intercom, explains:

In response, Sean and his team defined four common factors to evaluate each feature when deciding which to prioritize:

1. Reach: How many people will this feature affect in a given period? Reach is measured using real product metrics like “customers per quarter” or “transactions per month” to help avoid the bias of picking products or features that you personally want to build.
2. Impact: How much will this project move the needle on your goals and strategy? To make this more uniform, Sean uses a multiple-choice scale: 3 for “massive impact”, 2 for “high”, 1 for “medium”, 0.5 for “low”, and finally 0.25 for “minimal”.
3. Confidence: Based on what you know, how confident are you that this feature will be a success? Confidence helps back you up if you think a project will be impactful, but don’t have data to back it up. Again, using a simple multiple-choice scale makes this easy: 100% is “high confidence”, 80% is “medium”, 50% is “low”. (And anything below that is “total moonshot”).
4. Effort: How much time will the project require from product, design, and engineering teams? You can measure this in “person-months” and stick to whole numbers (with a minimum of half a month).

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Once you’ve got all your numbers for each feature, it’s time to put them into a simple equation:

Source: https://www.intercom.com/blog/rice-simple-prioritization-for-product-managers/

The resulting score gives you “total impact per time worked”—a pretty powerful number for prioritizing features accurately.

5. Use a Priority Scorecard to score features by custom criteria

The RICE Method isn’t the only way to accurately score your features. Sometimes you need to customize the factors that you score by to make sure that all your stakeholders’ needs are being met. In this case, a simple Priority Scorecard might be a better option.

With a Priority Scorecard, you start with a proposed list of parameters and their “weights” (basically, what is their importance as a percentage of the whole project?) It’s important that you start by making this list on your own, but then get stakeholder feedback to finetune the numbers.

Here’s an example from project manager Daniel Elizalde:

Category Customer Engagement User Experience Sales Funnel Operational Efficiency Total Weight 20% 10% 30% 40% 100%

Now, for each feature you’re prioritizing, assign a score from 1–100 for each of the Priority Scorecard categories. (100 means high impact on that category. 0 means no impact.)

So, if we’re trying to prioritize between a website redesign and a new checkout experience, it might look something like this:

Category Customer Engagement User Experience Sales Funnel Operational Efficient Total Weight 20% 10% 30% 40% 100% Feature: Score: Rating: Website Redesign 90 90 60 50 65 New Checkout 70 90 80 90 83

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The total score for each feature is calculated by multiplying the score by the weight. So for our website redesign that’s: 90 x 20% + 90 x 10% + 60 x 30% + 50 x 40%.

What’s great about this method is that as long as the features are all under the same theme, it allows you to prioritize based on the specific needs of your different stakeholders. And while there are still some opinions and biases in the model (based on how you figure out weights), it still lends significant credibility to the priorities on your roadmap.

6. Use the Kano Method to prioritize features by delight

As you prioritize features, you don’t want to forget that the end goal is to create something your customers will love.

With the Kano model, you get to see each potential feature through the lens of customer delight. It’s a bit of a more complicated process compared to the other methods we’ve looked at, but it can bring you some amazing insights when you’re feeling stuck.

With the Kano model, each potential feature is broken down into different categories and their emotional responses:

• Attractive Needs: These features trigger feelings of satisfaction and delight, but users are not dissatisfied if the feature is not included.
• Performance Needs: These features result in delight if they’re present and dissatisfaction when they’re not (or are flawed). They’re very one-dimensional in nature and rely on great execution to be valued by users.
• Basic Needs: These are your must-haves—the features your customer expects to be there. Not including them is dissatisfying, but the ROI of improving them tapers off quickly.

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Lastly, there’s also features that are simply undesired and take away the positive impact of your other features. Avoid these at all costs.

Source: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/10/giving-your-product-a-soul/

Now, here’s where things get tricky. To understand where each feature sits on the curve, you need to talk to a representative group of 12—24 users and ask them a few simple questions:

1. How would they feel if the feature was present?
2. How would the feel if the feature was not provided or not as fully present?

Each positive/negative question pair is answered with either “I like it,” “I expect it”, “I’m neutral”, “I can tolerate it”, or “I dislike it”. Based on the response, you can plot which emotional curve that feature sits on.

(Here’s a more in-depth explanation of implementing and using the Kano model from UX Magazine.)

7. Prioritize features by constraints

Lastly, if you’re still unsure of what features to prioritize based on the resources and needs you do have, it can be just as powerful to prioritize by what you don’t have.

Constraints like time, people, money, and process can be great ways to whittle down your options and focus in on features that are the most realistic and high-value.

Most constraints come down to two large buckets: People and processes.

For people: Start by asking if you have the right people for these projects. If yes, which of your right people would bring the best results? Are they available? If you answered “no” to the first question you might want to reconsider the features or look at hiring a freelancer or outside firm.

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For processes: Look at all the non-human things that limit what you can do. This means time (i.e. Will this feature fit into your delivery cycle?) as well as dependencies (i.e. What else needs to be done now or later to make this feature work?) Every feature you prioritize adds complexity to your overall product. And eventually the dependencies can be a major factor in whether or not you should build something.

Final thoughts on feature prioritization

There’s always a ton of excitement in the air when you start talking about things to build. New features are exciting. You can picture all the amazing places your product could go, the results they could bring, and what the best case scenario is. But as a product manager, you need to be the voice of reality.

As you go through and prioritize features into your product roadmap, remember that your overall strategy and product roadmap always need to be front and center. Don’t lose focus on the bigger picture by some exciting idea. Long-term strategy always trumps short-term results.

Be conservative and try to live by the mantra of “less is more”. Big features can just as easily be big risks if you don’t have the data and user research to back them up. Whenever possible, use Agile development practices to launch early and often.

Lastly, make time to regularly re-prioritize. Business needs change. Markets change. Leadership changes. And despite all the work you put into prioritizing features, those priorities will change as well. Set aside time to go through your list and make sure everything is still aligned with the bigger picture.

As your business grows, the amount of data that it needs to store and manage also grows. Storing this data on loose hard drives and individual workstations will no longer cut it: Your team needs ready data access, protection from loss, and capacity for future growth. The easiest way to provide all three quickly and easily is network attached storage (NAS).

You might have already considered buying a NAS device, or you purchased one that you’ve already grown out of, or this could be your first time looking at your options. No matter where you’re starting, the number of choices and features NAS systems offer today are overwhelming, especially when you’re trying to buy something that will work now and in the future.

This post aims to make your process a little easier. The following content will help you:

• Review the benefits of a NAS system.
• Navigate the options you’ll need to choose from.
• Understand the reason to pair your NAS with cloud storage.

How Can NAS Benefit Your Business?

There are multiple benefits that a NAS system can provide to users on your network, but we’ll recap a few of the key advantages here.

• More Storage. It’s a tad obvious, but the primary benefit of a NAS system is that it will provide a significant addition to your storage capacity if you’re relying on workstations and hard drives. NAS systems create a single storage volume from several drives (often arranged in a RAID scheme).
• Protection From Data Loss. Less obvious, but equally important, the RAID configuration in a NAS system ensures that the data you store can survive the failure of one or more of its hard drives. Hard drives fail! NAS helps to make that statement of fact less scary.
• Security and Speed. Beyond protection from drive failure, NAS also provides security for your data from outside actors as it is only accessible on your local office network and to user accounts which you can control. Not only that, but it generally works as fast as your local office network speeds.
• Better Data Management Tools. Fully automated backups, deduplication, compression, and encryption are just a handful of the functions you can put to work on a NAS system—all of which make your data storage more efficient and secure. You can also configure sync workflows to ease collaboration for your team, enable services to manage your users and groups with directory services, and even add services like photo or media management.

If this all sounds useful for your business, read on to learn more about bringing these benefits in-house.

The Network Attached Storage (NAS) Buyer’s Guide

How do you evaluate the differences between different NAS vendors? Or even within a single company’s product line? We’re here to help. This tour of the major components of a NAS system will help you to develop a tick list for the sizing and features of a system that will fit your needs.

Choosing a NAS: The Components

How your NAS performs is dictated by the components that make up the system, and capability of future upgrades. Let’s walk through the different options.

NAS Storage Capacity: How Many Bays Do You Need?

One of the first ways to distinguish between different NAS systems is the number of drive bays a given system offers, as this determines how many disks the system can hold. Generally speaking, the larger the number of drive bays, the more storage you can provide to your users and the more flexibility you have around protecting your data from disk failure.

In a NAS system, storage is defined by the number of drives, the shared volume they create, and their striping scheme (e.g. RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, etc.). For example, one drive gives no additional performance or protection. Two drives allows the option of simple mirroring. Mirroring is also referred to as RAID 1, when one volume is built from two drives, allowing for the failure of one of those drives without data loss. Two drives also allows for striping—referred to as RAID 0—when one volume is “stretched” across two drives, making a single, larger drive that also gives some performance improvement, but increases risk because the loss of one drive means that the entire volume will be unavailable.

Refresher: How Does RAID Work Again?
A redundant array of independent disks, or RAID, combines multiple hard drives into one or more storage volumes. RAID distributes data and parity (drive recovery information) across the drives in different ways, and each layout provides different degrees of data protection.

Three drives is the minimum for RAID 5, which can survive the loss of one drive, though four drives is a more common NAS system configuration. Five drives allow for RAID 6, which can survive the loss of two drives. Six to eight drives are very common NAS configurations that allow more storage, space, performance, and even drive sparing—the ability to designate a stand-by drive to immediately rebuild a failed drive.

Many believe that, if you’re in the market for a NAS system with multiple bays, you should opt for capacity that allows for RAID 6 if possible. RAID 6 can survive the loss of two drives, and delivers performance nearly equal to RAID 5 with better protection.

It’s understandable to think: Why do I need to prepare in case two drives fail? Well, when a drive fails and you replace it with a fresh drive, the rebuilding process to restore that drive’s data and parity information can take a long time. Though it’s rare, it’s possible to have another drive fail during the rebuilding process. In that scenario, if you have RAID 6 you’re likely going to be okay. If you have RAID 5, you may have just lost data.

Buyer’s Note: Some systems are sold without drives. Should you buy NAS with or without drives? That decision usually boils down to the size and type of drives you’d like to have.

When buying a NAS system with drives provided:

• The drives are usually covered by the manufacturer’s warranty as part of the complete system.
• The drives are typically bought directly from the manufacturer’s supply chain and shipped directly from the hard drive manufacturer.

If you choose to buy drives separately from your NAS:

• The drives may be a mix of drive production runs, and have been in the supply chain longer. Match the drive capacities and models for the most predictable performance across the RAID volume.
• Choose drives rated for NAS systems—NAS vendors publish lists of supported drive types. Here’s a list from QNAP, for example.
• Check the warranty and return procedures, and if you are moving a collection of older drives into your NAS, you may also consider how much of the warranty has already run out.

Buyer Takeaway: Choose a system that can support RAID 5 or RAID 6 to allow a combination of more storage space, performance, and drive failure protection. But be sure to check whether the NAS system is sold with or without drives.

Selecting Drive Capacity for the NAS: What Size of Drives Should You Buy?

You can quickly estimate how much storage you’ll need by adding up the hard drives and external drives of all the systems you’ll be backing up in your office, adding the amount of shared storage you’ll want to provide to your users, and factor in any growing demand you project for shared storage.

If you have any historical data under management from previous years, you can calculate a simple growth rate. But, include a buffer as data growth accelerates every year. Generally speaking, price out systems at two or four times the size of your existing data capacity. Let’s say that your hard drives and external drives to back up, and any additional shared storage you’d like to provide your users, add up to 20TB. Double that size to get 40TB to account for growth, then divide by a common hard drive size such as 10TB. With that in mind, you can start shopping for four bay systems and larger.

Formula 1: ((Number of NAS Users x Hard Drive Size ) + Shared Storage) * Growth Factor = NAS Storage Needed

Example: There are six users in an office that will each be backing up their 2TB workstations and laptops. The team will want to use another 6TB of shared storage for documents, images, and videos for everyone to use. Multiplied times a growth factor of two, you’d start shopping for NAS systems that offer at least 36TB of storage.

((Six users * 2TB each) + 6TB shared storage ) * growth factor of two = 36TB

Formula 2: ((NAS Storage Needed / Hard Drive Size) + Two Parity Drives) = Drive Bays Needed

Example: Continuing the example above, when looking for a new NAS system using 12TB drives, accounting for two additional drives for RAID 6, you’d look for NAS systems that can support five or more drive bays of 12TB hard drives.

(( 36TB / 12TB ) + two additional drives ) = Five drive bays and up

If your budget allows, opting for larger drives and more drive bays will give you more storage overhead that you’ll surely grow into over time. Factor in, however, that if you go too big, you’re paying for unused storage space for a longer period of time. And if you use GAAP accounting, you’ll need to capitalize that investment over the same time window as a smaller NAS system which will hit your bottom line on an annual basis. This is the classic CapEx vs. Opex dilemma you can learn more about here.

If your cash budget is tight you can always purchase a NAS system with more bays but smaller drives, which will significantly reduce your upfront pricing. You can then replace those drives in the future with larger ones when you need them. Hard drive prices generally fall over time, so they will likely be less expensive in the future. You’ll end up purchasing two sets of drives over time, which will be less cash-intensive at the outset, but likely more expensive in the long run.

Similarly, you can partially fill the drive bays. If you want to get an eight bay system, but only have the budget for six drives, just add the other drives later. One of the best parts of NAS systems is the flexibility they allow you for right-sizing your shared storage approach.

Buyer Takeaway: Estimate how much storage you’ll need, add the amount of shared storage you’ll want to provide to your users, and factor in growing demand for shared storage—then balance long term growth potential against cash flow.

Processor, Controllers, and Memory: What Performance Levels Do You Require?

Is it better to have big onboard processors or controllers? Smaller, embedded chips common in smaller NAS systems provide basic functionality, but might bog down when serving many users or crunching through deduplication and encryption tasks, which are options with many backup solutions. Larger NAS systems typically stored in IT data center racks usually offer multiple storage controllers that can deliver the fastest performance and even failover capability.

• Processor: Provides compute power for the system operation, services, and applications.
• Controller: Manages the storage volume presentation and health.
• Memory: Improves speed of applications and file serving performance.

ARM and Intel Atom chips are good for basic systems, while larger and more capable processors such as the Intel Corei3 and Corei5 are faster at NAS tasks like encryption, deduplication, and serving any on-board apps. Xeon server class chips can be found in many rack-mounted systems, too.

So if you’re just looking for basic storage expansion, the entry-level systems with more modest, basic chips will likely suit you just fine. If deduplication, encryption, sync, and other functions many NAS systems offer as optional tools are part of your future workflow, this is one area where you shouldn’t cut corners.

If you have the option to expand the system memory, this can be an easy performance upgrade. Generally, the higher the ratio of memory to drives will benefit the performance of reading and writing to disk and the speed of on-board applications.

Buyer Takeaway: Entry-level NAS systems provide good basic functionality, but you should ensure your components are up to the challenge if you plan to make heavy use of deduplication, encryption, compression, and other functions.

Network and Connections: What Capacity for Speed Do You Need?

A basic NAS will have a Gigabit Ethernet connection, which you will often find listed as 1GigE. This throughput of 1 Gb/s in network speeds is equivalent to 125 MB/s coming from your storage system. That means that the NAS system must fit storage service to all users within that limitation, which is usually not an issue when serving only a few users. Many systems offer expansion ports inside, allowing you to purchase a 10GigE network card later to upgrade your NAS.

Some NAS vendors offer 2.5 Gb/s, or 5 Gb/s connections on their systems—these will give you more performance than 1GigE connections, but usually require that you get a compatible network switch, and possibly, USB adapters or expansion cards for every system that will connect to that NAS via the switch. If your office is already wired for 10GigE, make sure your NAS is also 10GigE. Otherwise, the more network ports in the back of the system, the better. If you aren’t ready to get a 10GigE capable system now, but you think you might be in the future, select a system that has expansion capability.

Some systems provide another option of Thunderbolt connections in addition to Ethernet connections. These allow laptops and workstations with Thunderbolt ports to directly connect to the NAS and offer much higher bandwidth—up to 40GigE (5 GB/s)—and are good for systems that need to edit large files directly on the NAS, such as is often the case in video editing. If you’ll be directly connecting systems that need the fastest possible speeds, select a system with Thunderbolt ports, one per Thunderbolt-connected user.

Buyer Takeaway: It’s best to have more network ports in the back of your system. Or, select a system with network expansion card capability.

Caching and Hybrid Drive Features: How Fast Do You Need to Serve Files?

Many of the higher-end NAS systems can complement standard 5.25” hard drives with higher performing, smaller form factor SSD or M.2 drives. These smaller, faster drives can dramatically improve the NAS file serving performance by caching files in most recent, or most frequently requested files. By combining these different types of drives, the NAS can deliver both improved file serving performance, and large capacity.

As the number of users you support in each office grows, these capabilities will become more important as a relatively simple way to boost performance. Like we mentioned earlier, you can purchase a system with these slots unpopulated and add them in later.

Buyer Takeaway: Combine different types of drives, like smaller form factor SSD or M.2 storage with 5.25” hard drives to gain improved file serving performance.

Operating System: What Kind of Management Features Do You Require?

The NAS operating systems of the major vendors generally provide the same services in an OS-like interface delivered via an on-board web server. By simply typing in your NAS’s IP address, you can sign in and manage your system’s settings, create and manage the storage volumes, set up groups of users on your network who have access, configure and monitor backup and sync tasks, and more.

If there are specific user management features in your IT environment that you need, or want to test how the NAS OS works, you can test them by spinning up a demonstration virtual machine offered by some NAS vendors. You can test service configuration and get a feel for the interface and tools, but obviously as a virtual environment you won’t be able to manage hardware directly. Here are some options:

Buyer Takeaway: The on-board NAS OS looks similar to a Mac or PC operating system to make it easy to navigate system setup and maintenance and allows you to manage settings, storage, and tasks.

Solutions: What Added Services Do You Require?

While the onboard processor and memory on your NAS are primarily for file service, backup, and sync tasks, you can also install other solutions directly onto it. For instance, QNAP and Synology—two popular NAS providers—have app stores accessible from their management software where you can select applications to download and install on your NAS. You might be interested in a backup and sync solution such as Archiware, or CMS solutions like Joomla or WordPress.

However, beyond backup solutions, you’d benefit from installing mission-critical apps onto a dedicated system rather than on your NAS. For a small number of users, running applications directly on the NAS can be a good temporary use or a pathway to testing something out. But if the application becomes very busy, it could impact the other services of the NAS. Big picture, native apps on your NAS can be useful, but don’t overdo it.

Buyer Takeaway: The main backup and sync apps from the major NAS vendors are excellent—give them a good test drive, but know that there are many excellent backup and sync solutions available as well.

Why Adding Cloud Storage to Your NAS Offers Additional Benefits

When you pair cloud storage with your NAS, you gain access to features that complement the security of your data and your ability to share files both locally and remotely.

To start with, cloud storage provides off-site backup protection. This aligns your NAS setup with the industry standard for data protection: a 3-2-1 backup strategy—which ensures that you have three copies of your data, the source data and two backups—one of which is on your NAS, and the second copy of your data is protected off-site. And in the event of data loss, you can restore your systems directly from the cloud even if all the systems in your office are knocked out or destroyed.

While data sent to the cloud is encrypted in-flight via SSL, you can also encrypt your backups so that they are only openable with your team’s encryption key. The cloud can also give you advanced storage options for your backup files like Write Once, Read Many (WORM) or immutability—making your data unchangeable for a defined period of time—or set custom data lifecycle rules at the bucket level to help match your ideal backup workflow.

Additionally, cloud storage provides valuable access to your data and documents from your NAS through sync capabilities. In case anyone on your team needs to access a file when they are away from the office, or as is more common now, in case your entire team is working from home, they’ll be able to access the files that have been synced to the cloud through your NAS’s secure sync program. You can even sync across multiple locations using the cloud as a two-way sync to quickly replicate data across locations. For employees collaborating across great distances, this helps to ensure they’re not waiting on the internet to deliver critical files: They’re already on-site.

Refresher: What’s the Difference Between Cloud Sync, Cloud Backup, and Cloud Storage? Sync services allow multiple users across multiple devices to access the same file. Backup stores a copy of those files somewhere remote from your work environment, oftentimes in an off-site server—like cloud storage. It’s important to know that a “sync” is not a backup, but they can work well together when properly coordinated. You can read more about the differences in this

Sync services allow multiple users across multiple devices to access the same file. Backup stores a copy of those files somewhere remote from your work environment, oftentimes in an off-site server—like cloud storage. It’s important to know that a “sync” is not a backup, but they can work well together when properly coordinated. You can read more about the differences in this blog post

Ready to Set Up Your NAS With Cloud Storage

To summarize, here are a few things to remember when shopping for a NAS system:

• Consider how much storage you’ll need for both local backup and for shared user storage.
• Look for a system with three to five drive bays at minimum.
• Check that the NAS system is sold with drives—if not, you’ll have to source enough of the same size drives.
• Opt for a system that lets you upgrade the memory and network options.
• Choose a system that meets your needs today; you can always upgrade in the future.

Coupled with cloud storage like Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage, which is already integrated with NAS systems from Synology and QNAP, you gain necessary backup protection and restoration from the cloud, as well as the capability to sync across locations.

Have more questions about NAS features or how to implement a NAS system in your environment? Ask away in the comments.

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