What I Learned About Lucidity at the IT Press Tour

What if cloud storage could finally behave like cloud computing? Dynamic, elastic, and effortless. That was the question Lucidity set out to answer at the IT Press Tour. After their full presentation and live demo. I left with the sense that they are addressing something the cloud giants have sidestepped for years.

Lucidity didn’t show up with hype. They brought a working product, real customer use cases, and a calm confidence that comes from solving real problems at scale. They are not inserting themselves into data streams. They are not promising miracles. They are quietly making one of the most neglected layers of cloud infrastructure more efficient, stable, and less burdensome.

A Storage System That Looks After Itself

Lucidity describes itself as a multi-cloud storage management company. That phrase usually raises red flags. But in this case, the label fits. Their AutoScaler product handles the kind of low-level decisions that cloud users rarely want to deal with. Adjusting volume sizes automatically across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

These decisions are usually based on guesses. Volumes are over-provisioned. Resizing is risky or requires too much effort. Teams leave things as they are and accept waste as a cost of doing business.

“Most enterprise storage is provisioned at two to three times what’s needed. Shrinking it has typically required manual effort and downtime.”

Lucidity’s architecture avoids these problems with its lightweight agent, which is deployed across virtual machines. It monitors disk use, reports to a central system, and receives instructions to expand or shrink capacity based on real-time usage. The demo made it look simple. In one example, a customer automated over 50,000 provisioning tasks and reduced costs by 60 percent.

Another customer experienced a sudden increase in disk utilization from 21 to 82 percent, with no apparent effort from their team. Onboarding takes minutes. The agent installs from a central dashboard. No manual logins or per-VM setup. “Most customers don’t revisit the dashboard after onboarding,“ said Raj Dutt, VP of Marketing. “They don’t need to. It runs itself.”

This is where Lucidity’s engineering work stands out. In most environments, you can add storage but not reduce it. Even when the volume holds less data, you’re still billed for the original size. That creates long-term waste.

Lucidity tackled this on two fronts: the operating system and the cloud provider’s billing API. On Linux, they use Btrfs. On Windows, they stay compatible with NTFS. In both cases, there’s no need to change the file system or modify applications. They shrink the volume safely and reclaim unused space.

They also don’t handle any application data. “We’re not in the data path. We never touch your read or write operations,“  That distinction makes a big difference when you’re talking to customers who care about security and performance.

It was impressive to see the platform maintain disk utilization at nearly 80 percent in real-time across hundreds of VMs, with no slowdowns and no intervention.

Tiering That Doesn’t Require Guesswork

After AutoScaler, the team revealed something new: Lumen. While most engineers play it safe when choosing storage tiers. They default to the highest-performing option to avoid complaints about speed. However, these decisions often become outdated within a few weeks. No one wants to go through the pain of downgrading, especially if it means disruption.

Lumen changes that. It analyzes disk usage over time, compares it to the capabilities of available tiers, and suggests adjustments. If a workload is using a premium tier without needing its IOPS or latency benefits, Lumen will flag it. Then, with a single click, users can transition to a more suitable tier.

There’s no downtime. No reboot. There is no risk of application failure. In a world where tiering adjustments have been slow and risky, this is a significant improvement.

The interface displays potential savings, highlights underutilized resources, and provides detailed historical charts. It is not just analytics. It is action-ready insight.

The Business Side: Simple Pricing, Focused Value

Lucidity doesn’t price based on allocated capacity. They charge based on the amount of data under management. The current model is sixty dollars per terabyte per month. If you provision a one-terabyte disk but only use 300 gigabytes, you are only billed for 300 gigabytes.

That model rewards optimization, which aligns with the company’s overall approach. “We’re not here just to reduce your bill,“ Dutt said. “We’re making it easier to run these systems without constant oversight.”

That matters, especially for enterprise partners. Lucidity supports self-hosted deployments for customers in regulated sectors. They also allow for private connectivity through options like Azure Private Link. That flexibility could be helpful in Europe and other regions where cloud sovereignty and data locality remain active concerns.

My Takeaway

Lucidity aims to make cloud infrastructure smarter without requiring teams to reinvent their entire architecture. AutoScaler solves a long-ignored problem of wasted capacity. Lumen tackles the inertia around tiering. Both improve operational outcomes quietly and consistently.

The company still has room to grow. Support is limited to AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. European cloud providers and industry-specific platforms are not yet covered. But based on the modular architecture and product roadmap, those gaps seem more like timing than technical blockers.

Lucidity may not grab headlines like other infrastructure startups, but it is building tools that could become part of how modern infrastructure operates.

I will be speaking with the team at Lucidity on the Tech Talks Daily Podcast in the next few weeks. If you have any questions you would like me to ask, please let me know, and you can also be a part of the conversation.