Choate Construction Renders Traditional IT Hardware an Afterthought with Egnyte

Known for its proven results and partnership-driven approach, Choate Construction Company’s employee-owners provide nationally recognized commercial construction services for its clients and industry partners. Offering the benefits of a nationwide contractor with the dedicated touch of a local firm, Choate Construction’s specialized personnel consistently deliver successful projects across a variety of market sectors, including industrial, healthcare, hospitality, corporate, mixed-use, and more. From its innovative OneLife safety program to its philanthropic efforts to “Build Up” its communities, Choate’s ultimate purpose is to enrich the world through the people, places, and relationships it builds. 

As Choate grew, so did the company’s information, creating challenges with permissions, folder structures, accessibility, performance, and storage. Even with AWS cloud infrastructure, Choate saw an opportunity to further optimize and streamline how company information was managed at scale. Its technology investment in Egnyte made that optimization possible. 

Challenge: Traditional Cloud Solutions and Local IT Miss the Mark

Over the course of Waters’ career, she has seen the use of technology in the construction industry proliferate to the point that her company, whose tech stack once consisted of little more than Microsoft Office and preconstruction software, now uses more than 60 different applications. But while Choate has been an early tech adopter, scaling information across multiple offices and jobsites proved challenging.  

This created significant hurdles for the company. As Waters explains, “When a new job started or a physical office renovated or relocated, we had to figure out: Do we need to add servers? What other hardware is needed? How are we handling permissions?” Juggling cloud and local infrastructure increased administrative costs and workload. Prior to Egnyte, teams utilized Citrix to access file servers remotely, which, while effective for its time, wasn’t designed with a mobile-first user experience in mind. 

Choate could not remain reliant on infrastructure that involved storing data in multiple locations, was difficult to permission at scale, and difficult to access remotely. Instead, the company needed a solution that married scalable cloud infrastructure with scalable permissions. Choate’s IT team set about looking for a technology partner that could make that happen. 

Solution: A Secure, Centralized Cloud Environment in Egnyte

• Prowess in the AEC space 
  Egnyte’s track record of serving—and understanding the unique needs of—the construction industry was “hugely important,” Waters says. “Project files in construction can have unique requirements, it was critical for us to work with a partner that understood that complexity. Egnyte is just that partner. Whether it’s the simple process of adding content from their mobile app, Egnyte’s Procore integration, or the ease with which we can search content or access it remotely, Egnyte’s understanding of construction helps us in many ways.” 
  
• Governing content access 
  Also impressive was how easy Egnyte made it to gain full visibility into where content was stored and who had access to it. The Choate team could set access permissions on project templates to have project security 85% setup before project folders were created in Egnyte. “Setting and managing file permissions can get complicated,” Waters says. “We love the simplicity of using groups and preconfiguring the majority of our permissions. We can audit access easier and administer access changes quickly.” Waters also comments on the impact this had in reducing security vulnerabilities: “Egnyte helped us follow least privileged access. Before, we struggled to see who had access to what, or where content was stored. Now all it takes is a quick look in Egnyte to see all of our content and how it’s permissioned.” 
  
• User experience 
  Based on her experience with other technology solutions, Waters expected pushback and learning curves when it came time to implement Egnyte. None of that happened. As she explains, “Our users love Egnyte, particularly the remote access functionality. If they’re traveling and there’s a project question, they can view the content in Egnyte’s mobile app and resolve questions quickly. We’ve never had that ease of access for project files, it’s a game changer for accessibility.” 

Once Egnyte was implemented, it served as a centralized location for content, governed by granular permissions with flexible yet secure accessibility. In fact, when Choate decided to open their seventh location, permissions and folder structures were preconfigured, employee-owners in that division had immediate access to Egnyte’s cloud environment — no server setup or additional IT administration necessary. 

Benefits: A Clear Runway for Uninterrupted Productivity

With Egnyte, Choate has removed many of its information accessibility challenges and the headaches that came with them. Information is more accessible—and better secured—than ever before. The firm’s confidence in its ability to control information access is heading in the right direction. All of this has broken down the impediments that had previously caused frustration. “Egnyte has made us a more productive company,” Waters says. “In the past, we had to pause to discuss servers, storage, backups, and permissions – our discussions on those topics now are half what they once were. We can add users, storage, and change permissions directly in Egnyte quickly and easily in most cases.” 

Moving to Egnyte also presented Choate with an unexpected option when opening their seventh location: the possibility of a serverless office. The Choate team is continuing to test this concept and are excited to see the many impacts this infrastructure flexibility could have in the future. Being able to focus on being a builder and less on IT infrastructure is a win for the team’s productivity. And while they expect to have a few physical servers stick around, the hope is to leverage Egnyte’s scalability to limit that. 

Another accelerator: The Egnyte team’s readiness to give Choate support during all phases. “Egnyte is truly dedicated to our success,” Waters says. “During our implementation and post-implementation, our Egnyte Customer Success and Account Team have been responsive and informative. We work with a lot of technology companies and have experienced service decrease post-sales or post-implementation. When we have a challenge, Egnyte has stepped up to help without asking for professional service agreements for every little thing, that means a lot to our working relationship. Egnyte is committed to getting Choate to full utilization of the platform by keeping us in the loop on new features and doing ad-hoc training with our team.” 

With Egnyte up and running, Choate’s IT team is enjoying the peace of mind that the company’s partnership with Egnyte has provided. “Between information security and access limitations, there were so many hurdles that made technology work against us instead of for us,” she explains. “It’s empowering to see many of those hurdles become secondary concerns with Egnyte in our toolbox.”