Users and administrators alike have come to rely on standard NAS functions to create, manage, share and protect file-based data throughout its lifetime. However, this functionality is limited to a single site. Globally distributed enterprises must deploy islands of storage across sites, inhibiting optimization, centralized management, and load balancing. Ideally, administrators should be able to install a single cloud-integrated, file-based storage system that grants visibility of all files to all users at all sites at any time, while preserving local NAS security, file locking, access control, encryption, and consistency.