MOMA Therapeutics is a clinical-stage, next-generation biotech doing big things in precision medicine. But while its R&D, which focuses on utilizing its proprietary KNOMATIC™ platform to discover small-molecule medicines that target highly dynamic proteins is innovative, it’s also extremely data-intensive. That makes the firm’s IT posture paramount, especially as it relates to CRO collaboration and the management of lab data.
 

When the IT services provider Pliancy connected MOMA with Egnyte, the company maximized efficiency, efficacy, and control in these critical areas.

Challenge: Make External Collaboration More Efficient and Secure

MOMA started its first Phase I clinical trial in 2024, a milestone that is both exciting and a signifier of the four-year-old company’s relative youth. At this early stage, conducting an in-house trial can be costly–a consideration that has made MOMA inclined to partner with CROs for many clinical development activities.
 

“Clinical is an extremely expensive function for a company of our size,” explains Kate Hardy, Senior Director of Informatics and Technology at MOMA. “We can’t justify the cost of hiring a ton of full-time employees to build out a full clinical organization yet.”
 

While outsourcing has helped MOMA be more intentional with their budget, it has also complicated the company’s information environment. “We now have this mixed environment of both internal and external people, so for security purposes, we need to have really good control and visibility into who has access to what information,” Hardy says. “The goal was to strike a balance between making content easily accessible to those who need to see it, while also ensuring external collaborators didn’t get access to something only MOMA employees should see.”
 

Access controls weren't the only issue: Partners could resort to suboptimal file sharing practices without a structured and well-governed content environment. “In my previous experience working with CROs, I've seen data frequently shared through email due to lack of access to a centralized repository,” explains Hardy.

Then there was the issue of lab data. As Hardy explains: “Scientists collect valuable data on lab instruments, but it gets siloed on computers in the lab. To get it into the database, they might email it to themselves or use thumb drives. This is just a nightmare from a security perspective, and an efficiency perspective.”

Solution: A Unified and Secure Content Environment in the Cloud

Pliancy is a key partner in MOMA’s technology strategy. The IT services provider allows MOMA to outsource much of its technology workload, from business tools to security licenses and beyond. As Hardy puts it: “Pliancy is effectively my IT team.”
 

It was through Pliancy that MOMA connected with Egnyte to address the issues MOMA was facing with collaboration and lab data management. Hardy was able to create a folder structure in Egnyte with a designated area for external collaborators, giving CRO partners an easy way to share data without resorting to email and thumb drives. She offers an example: “If there’s a CRO doing assay screening for us and we want to get their raw data files, they just drop them into the proper folder. Their scientists can log into Egnyte and upload the content, and we can immediately see it.”
 

Egnyte’s access permissions functionality allowed MOMA to group users by role and provision access to different folders accordingly. This ensured CROs only had access to the proper folders for external collaborators and were blocked from viewing data intended for MOMA employees.
 

Robust permissioning on its own may not always be sufficient as human error is a possibility. But Egnyte provided holistic visibility and timely alerts that keeps MOMA on top of any irregularities. “Egnyte makes it so easy to audit the entire content lifecycle,” Hardy says. “We can see exactly who has access to what, who is downloading and deleting content, and whether they’re doing so appropriately. We once had a situation where information had been unintentionally added to a folder for the wrong collaborator, and using the Egnyte audit reporting features, we were able to confirm nothing had been viewed or accessed by the incorrect people. This is especially important now that we are working in a much more regulated space and need to be compliant with our handling of PHI and PII. I appreciate that we can set alerts for sensitive content access and sharing.”
 

Critically, Egnyte’s lab-to-cloud functionality freed MOMA and its scientists from the poor lab data management practices that had previously dogged them. As Hardy explains: “We can map the drive of our lab computers to a specific location within Egnyte. That means any data generated on lab instruments is automatically fed into Egnyte, which is more secure and convenient for our scientists.”

Benefits: More Efficiency and Less Risk in CRO Outsourcing

MOMA is currently using Egnyte to collect data from 16 lab instruments. Collaborating with CROs has never been easier or more secure. And all of these benefits have come through a platform perfectly suited to Hardy’s, and MOMA’s, needs. “As someone who needs to run IT efficiently, I think Egnyte is just fantastic,” Hardy says. “We don’t need to hire administrators–it just works. It has so many great tools for keeping things secure and compliant, it keeps our lab data safe and organized, it’s flexible in terms of content access, and it’s so easy to use that onboarding is a breeze.”

Sean Akers, IT Consultant at Pliancy, echoes that last point: “Egnyte is probably the easiest file sharing tool I’ve used. Organizing everything and setting up permissions is very smooth, and on the rare occasions when we do get support tickets, it’s always something we can handle quickly.”
 

Now that MOMA has established a stronger security posture and built a thorough permissions structure, the next step is to expand on policies to address questions such as what kinds of files are tagged as sensitive and where they’re stored. With that in mind, Hardy expects her future use of Egnyte to include Egnyte’s Secure & Govern tool.

MOMA has used other file sharing and collaboration platforms, namely Microsoft SharePoint and Teams. They have now standardized on Egnyte. “We prefer to limit our external use of technology platforms, and if we have to choose one to use both internally and externally, it’s definitely Egnyte,” Hardy explains. “This isn’t just because of how easy it is to use or the features I’ve already described. It’s because Egnyte has extensive experience working with life sciences companies and because they’re so great to work with. Whatever the issue, I always know Egnyte will listen to it and solve it. I certainly can’t say that about all vendors.”

As a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, Foghorn Therapeutics works to develop therapeutics for people living with cancer. Foghorn manages a wealth of highly sensitive scientific and financial data. To protect these assets, Foghorn needed a comprehensive data governance strategy. Egnyte served as the linchpin of those efforts.

Challenge: Data Architecture to Protect Intellectual Property

Foghorn Therapeutics originally implemented Egnyte’s core collaboration platform, with features like real-time co-editing and version control empowering dispersed stakeholders to work on the same document simultaneously. However, as more drug compounds started moving from pre-clinical testing into Phase I trials – and the company started producing more data – governance became the team’s top priority. The Foghorn team needed to build a secure and well-controlled clinical data repository to protect their intellectual property, including clinical, research, and financial data pertaining to Foghorn’s molecules and chemical structures.

Solution: Egnyte Provides Broad Visibility and Control

Foghorn’s goals for Egnyte’s Secure & Govern features were twofold: first, to build a clinical data repository that provided full visibility into the location of sensitive content; and second, to secure that content with appropriate access permissions.

Leveraging Egnyte’s standard governance policies offered a substantial level of protection for Foghorn’s financial and scientific data. Additionally, the team created custom policies in order to identify any content containing specific keywords and note the exact storage location of that content. All of this information is made available in an intuitive dashboard within the Secure & Govern tool. The team can decide if any remediation actions or retention policies are necessary based on the type and location of a given file.

Egnyte’s Customer Success and Services teams were helpful partners in establishing Foghorn’s new security model. Dan Dinu, vice president and head of IT, explains: “The Egnyte team spent significant time to understanding our data flow processes and assisting us in developing the appropriate policies. We scheduled dedicated sessions to understand the data, create the policies, and fine-tune as needed.”

The second step involved leveraging Egnyte’s permissions functionality to ensure data was only accessible to appropriate stakeholders. For this, Foghorn leverages Egnyte’s highly intuitive permission governance which includes permission control, permission browsers and robust reporting. According to Dan:

Benefits: Secure Data and Fully Informed Decision-Making

Building a secure data governance environment in Egnyte allows Foghorn to ensure that nothing is overlooked. The team always has visibility into the location of sensitive financial and scientific data so that they can swiftly apply necessary restrictions on how that content is shared and accessed.

So far, the team has created eight custom Secure & Govern policies in Egnyte to ensure this visibility is as thorough as possible. Some of these policies include scanning for specific file types (e.g., ChemDraw, SMILES files) or certain keywords (e.g., lead compounds).

Foghorn Therapeutics continues to partner with Egnyte and expand its adoption to support its growing research and clinical activities.

Dan Dinu is pleased with the decision to move forward with Egnyte. “We evaluated solutions from Box and Microsoft but found Egnyte to best meet our requirements. Our lean IT team can easily manage, monitor, and scale Egnyte as needed.”

When emerging life sciences companies come to IT services provider Pliancy, they’re looking for tech they can grow into as they move from a crawl to a sprint. For Pliancy, success depends on their ability to deliver clients the kind of flexible, cost-effective solutions they need without having to handhold every step of the way.

With Pliancy’s support, biotech companies can implement Egnyte to build cloud-hosted file management ecosystems that work just as well for five employees as for 500. As a result, they spend more time focusing on their mission and less time putting out fires.

Challenge: Clear Obstacles Impeding Client Growth

The majority of Pliancy’s clients are emerging life science companies with little to no in-house IT staff. They come to Pliancy ready to grow, but often don’t have the day-to-day technical systems in place to support that growth. For Pliancy’s team, the goal is not only to connect clients with the tools they need today, but set them up with systems that can grow with them tomorrow.

“When it’s a brand new, out-of-the-box company, that’s when we have the biggest heart-to-heart,” says David Cole, Technical Product Manager at Pliancy. “We focus on things like: What are your requirements? What do you want to be able to do in five years?”

One of the biggest challenges during these conversations, Cole says, is helping clients who have found themselves stuck with massive amounts of technical debt from previous file management vendors. “Life science companies work with CROs more and more these days,” he notes, and many that do come to him are trapped in a “spider web of permissions” that hobble their growth potential. “There’s a shared drive and the personal drive, and then there’s this other group that’s on this different shared drive.”

All of this creates plenty of growing pains for teams that want to scale their operations quickly instead of spending their time navigating complex permissions environments.

Solution: Fast, Sustainable Growth Without Costly Roadblocks

Life science companies who choose to implement Egnyte can gracefully move through each phase of their company’s growth with ease. One story that encapsulates this involves an incubator in Menlo Park, California that came to Pliancy when the team outgrew their current setup.

“When they came to us, they were in an incubator space with shared networks, spaces, and labs,” Cole explains. To help facilitate seamless collaboration during the transition to a new lab space, Pliancy helped them deploy Egnyte with role-based file access permissions, and later added Storage Sync. What began as a five-person operation quickly grew to 60. Later on, the team realized they needed extra security and governance functionality, and enlisted Pliancy’s help to upgrade to a Platform Enterprise plan. “This kind of progression is pretty common with our life science companies that start on Egnyte,” says Cole.

For clients that choose to scale with Egnyte, Pliancy says the benefits are three-fold:

• Flexibility
  As Cole explains, there are several layers to Egnyte that make it easy for companies to scale, with one of them being flexibility. “Once a client comes in, and we set up their folder structure and their per-user provisioning in Egnyte, maybe they say they want to add a lab. Well, great, they can deploy Storage Sync. Or if they say they’re getting too much storage, no problem, we can add an archiving domain. This kind of flexibility is great for companies who want to launch quickly without having to do a huge migration, which a lot of other companies would require.”
• Ease of use
  Pliancy Escalations Engineer Brandon Kimbler shared another story of a client who moved a folder by accident in Egnyte. When the help ticket came in, Egnyte made it simple to solve the problem in no time. “I have reports running daily. I checked one of the reports, found the user in five seconds and found the exact way they moved it. We were immediately able to give them peace of mind.”
• Cost and time savings
  With such easy and efficient administration, the Pliancy team says their customers are able to avoid unnecessary issues and save valuable time and money. Sales Engineer Noah Tagliaferri tells clients, “You can go with another solution besides Egnyte. But you’ll likely end up calling us more, and spending more money, when bugs or permission problems start popping up.”

Benefits: A Flexible Solution That’s Easy to Recommend

Both Pliancy and its clients benefit from Egnyte. Tagliaferri says Egnyte allows him and his Pliancy sales team to reduce excess labor and focus on more high-value work. Whether it’s pulling reports, figuring out permissions, or resolving more complex client issues, Tagliaferri says it quickly adds up to more work on his end.

Cole echoes this, explaining how Egnyte’s responsive support team not only makes the technology easy to work with, but easy to recommend to clients.

Thanks to the benefits for everyone involved, Kimbler says Egnyte will continue to be a “simple, safe, and flexible” go-to for Pliancy’s life science clients moving forward. “Egnyte has proven perfect for helping new companies build an IT launch point that sets them up for success, whether in security, CRO collaboration, or any other IT need a life sciences startup may have. We fully intend to keep Egnyte at the center of our conversations with the new clients we’re bringing in.”

Kimbler ends with a few words of advice to future clients: "Egnyte makes our clients feel safe. Once we get the system set up and dialed in, they have full confidence that my team will be able to provide them the support they need, and that they’re in good hands. If you’re an ascending player in the life sciences space, I think Egnyte is the perfect cloud file sharing platform, both for where you are today and where you’ll be five years from now.”

From connecting its remote workers to managing transaction-heavy CAD files smoothly and quickly, the engineering firm QK had major logistical gaps to fill just to be able to do its work. Even after a large-scale server migration that first tried to leverage Panzura, then Azure Files, the company suffered from poor cross office and remote collaborative experiences that kept civil engineers mired in workarounds and slowed its projects.

QK realized it would take a fully cloud-hosted solution to facilitate smooth file management and move projects forward. Egnyte was that solution.

Challenge: Foster Engineering Work Without Excessive Workarounds

Kristoffer Law, IT Administrator at QK, recalls the file management paradigm at the company when he started there: “We had independent file servers siloed in each of our offices, which made cross-office work nearly impossible.” To address this, the firm relocated each server to its central office, creating a unified data repository that its handful of remote staff could access via VPN.

But with one issue solved, another emerged: QK works largely with CAD files that include countless XREFS, any of which could be subject to multiple edits and access requests at any time. This added up to major bandwidth demands that the system had trouble satisfying. “CAD files are so transaction-heavy, which created a huge slowdown, and solutions were hard to find,” explains Law. “Vendors like Riverbed didn’t work well with GIS, which is a huge part of what we do, and virtual desktop interfaces caused a lot of latency.”

Then came Covid. Although the team’s data was newly centralized in QK’s Visalia office, the civil engineers working with that data were suddenly dispersed across the region. Demand for remote access skyrocketed, and VPN connectivity proved unsustainable at such a large scale. “We had started using Panzura, which was good at handling our CAD transactions, but not at facilitating direct file access for remote staff,” says Law. “Engineers had to use VPNs, which were so prone to crashing and latency that folks often downloaded files and worked on them locally. That, in turn, created huge version control issues.”

With a makeshift infrastructure consisting of software vendors, VPN connections, virtual desktop interfaces, and locally-stored design applications, the team found themselves spending nearly as much time managing their technology as advancing their projects. They knew something would need to change.

Solution: Egnyte Reduces Complexity for a Frustrated Team

Law discovered Egnyte after an external collaborator on a GIS project sent him a link to a file via Egnyte’s secure link sharing functionality. “It was everything we needed,” says Law. “With Egnyte, everything is stored in the cloud, so civil engineers can access and manage files directly anywhere with an internet connection.”

Law points to several specific ways in which Egnyte facilitated both large-scale remote file access and collaboration on large CAD files:

• Faster performance
  Frequent XREF transactions, which come with the territory for CAD-intensive firms like QK, were highly taxing on local servers, VDIs, and other systems the company had tried. But with Egnyte, Law says, “All of that computing demand shifts to the cloud, and with Egnyte’s Desktop app, things are fast and smooth regardless of file size.”
   
• Eliminating geographic limitations
  Any changes made to a file sync to Egnyte’s cloud environment immediately, ensuring nobody is working on an outdated version of that file. “With Egnyte’s PDF editor, our construction management folks can go out to a site and work on mobile devices without later having to manually copy their changes from the device into a file server. Instead, those changes sync automatically, which is not just convenient, but eliminates the risk of losing content in transition,” Law explains. “We don’t even need a constant internet connection. For instance, we have GIS technicians working in areas with unreliable internet. With Egnyte, they can work on GIS files offline, and their updates sync as soon as they get a connection. It’s totally smooth, even with heavy GIS content like parcel data in San Bernardino County, which is just massive.”
   
• File locking
  QK is a heavy Civil 3D user, with multiple people often working in the same Civil 3D file simultaneously. Previously, when more than two or three people were working on a file at the same time, synchronization conflicts would arise, with stakeholders overwriting each other’s changes. But with Egnyte, Law says, “we have a single file repository that locks, so if one person is in a file, another person can’t get in until the first person finishes. That prevents the overwrites and synchronization problems we were dealing with.”

Benefits: Long Distances Feel Short, Large Files Feel Small

To date, QK has migrated roughly 8 terabytes of project data into Egnyte, spanning disciplines from CAD to GIS and beyond. The team is now working faster and more efficiently, regardless of where stakeholders are located or the size and complexity of the files they’re working on.

“Right before Egnyte, we were using Azure Storage with a VPN connection to manage our workflows,” Law says. “Since switching to Egnyte, our CAD folks are working about 40% faster. In other transaction-heavy areas like GIS, we had one user who used to take over an hour to do some work on a geoprocessing tool––with Egnyte, it now takes two minutes.”

Law speaks to other ways Egnyte has outperformed other solutions. “Basically, if you look at a Venn Diagram of Egnyte and the other systems we tried, Egnyte is basically a circle encompassing those other systems while also including tons of other great features. I love Egnyte’s auditing and cybersecurity features, which we couldn’t get elsewhere unless we paid an exorbitant additional cost. Looking ahead, we’re exploring integrations between Egnyte and other platforms like Autodesk and Procore, and Microsoft co-editing.”

The impact of Egnyte has rippled across QK’s organization and partner ecosystem and come back to Law through glowing feedback from everyone who has interacted with the platform. “Once we moved to Egnyte, our civil engineers breathed a huge collective sigh of relief,” Law explains. “People are thrilled not to have to operate over VPN or deal with bottlenecks anymore. They’ve reported considerable improvements in speed. We’ve also been able to handle staff moving to remote regions with slow internet connections by instructing them to use Egnyte’s Offline Sync function for large project files. I’ve even talked to one of our MSP partners who has seen how much we’ve benefited from Egnyte and now they want to sell it to their other clients.”

Of all the systems with which QK has tried to address its challenges in recent years, only Egnyte has acted more as a help than a hindrance, empowering the firm to adapt to the remote-first norms of the post-Covid era without sacrificing speed or performance. Whatever changes the future may bring, Law is confident he can count on Egnyte: “For Egnyte to stop working, the internet would somehow have to vanish out of existence. Short of that, I know it’s there for us.”

The Middle East division of China State Construction and Engineering Corp (CSCEC ME) manages multiple offices and construction projects across Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Qatar. As the company grew, its reliance on local file servers and paper documents for content collaboration became untenable.

Using Egnyte to digitize files and cloud-enable collaboration, the company unified its various offices and technology partners, developed an eagle eye against ransomware, and gained total control over its ecosystem.

Solution: Cloud-Enable Collaboration Through Egnyte

The team decided to migrate their data from local servers and paper into Egnyte’s cloud-hosted content environment. Egnyte immediately provided greater control over how – and how quickly – content was managed, accessed, and shared. “We simply create Egnyte folders to store our files and provide individuals and teams with access to those folders as needed,” Zhao says. “That gives the company full control over the data – people can access files from anywhere if we’ve provided the necessary permissions. And once a file is in Egnyte, we can share it with stakeholders instantly via secure links instead of email attachments, or worse, driving around with paper files.

Leo Honorio, IT Engineer at CSCEC ME, elaborates on the security issue. “Egnyte is great at detecting potential risks to our data and alerting us before it becomes a problem. We had a ransomware incident shortly after switching to Egnyte, but the system alerted us to it so quickly that we were able to take swift action and neutralize it immediately.”

As a construction and engineering firm, CSCEC ME relies heavily on technology partners such as Autodesk. Egnyte’s integration with Autodesk did wonders for facilitating these workflows. “We can access AutoCAD files directly from Egnyte, without having to switch between systems or download or upload anything,” Honorio explains. “It’s so empowering to have all our vendors at an arm’s reach, all from a centralized place.”

Benefits: Unified Control of Content and Security Environment

Since implementing Egnyte, CSCEC ME has asserted an unprecedented level of control over their content and workflows. This includes greater governance of how files are shared and accessed, more visibility into their security environment, and the ability to access files in third-party platforms directly – without jumping through hoops.

With more control, the team can work faster, which has yielded concrete improvements in areas like project setup. “Between gathering all the hardware and software, it often used to take us three or four months to set up a new project,” Zhao says. “With Egnyte, we can get up and running in just one day.”

Zhao concludes with a note on the timing of the switch to Egnyte. “We were already in the process of migrating our data into Egnyte’s cloud environment when Covid struck. Can you imagine if we hadn’t even started yet? The shift to fully remote work would have really broken things. But because of Egnyte, we were able to take the transition in stride.”

RIOS is an award-winning international design collective actively pursuing wonder within the design of the built environment. Founded in 1985, the collective practices interconnected design across architecture, interiors, landscape architecture, master planning, and placemaking for diverse projects including residential, commercial, civic, hospitality, retail and institutional. RIOS recently opened offices in London, Shanghai and Singapore, and has active projects across the globe.

As RIOS expanded into international markets and adopted a hybrid workplace, technology challenges emerged. However, with the help of Egnyte and a move to the cloud, RIOS was able to provide new capabilities to their design teams without requiring them to learn new workflows. This transition to the cloud gave the firm more flexibility and the ability to scale more efficiently.

Challenge: Manage Growth While Minimizing Tech Burden

While highly skilled in design applications like Revit and Rhino, the team at RIOS are most productive when they can prioritize their design processes and outcomes rather than navigating the underlying technology that facilitates it. “We were managing a data center in our own building, as well as all the pieces necessary to support it,” explains Matt Richmond, Chief Technology Officer at RIOS. “As we grew, the burden of technology grew with us. First and foremost, we’re designers, so we wanted to free ourselves of that challenge.”

At the same time, after shifting to a hybrid work model and opening several international offices, the company found itself collaborating across large geographical distances. This added a new technology challenge to their growing infrastructure management demands: reliance on virtual private networks. “People in any remote office or working from home could not access critical content unless they used a VPN to connect to our headquarters,” explains Richmond. “But the VPN was practically unusable from a performance perspective.”

The team began searching for a cloud-based platform to relieve them of the demands of maintaining local infrastructure and their reliance on VPNs. Their primary goal: to gain the benefits of cloud software without having to change the way people preferred to work. “The last thing we wanted was to break the file access workflows we had built over years. We wanted people to open their machines and be able to access files through a mapped drive, just like they always have,” Richmond says. “We considered SharePoint, Office 365, even virtualizing our workstations in Azure. None of them offered that familiarity. And the performance was far inferior. Ultimately, we were looking at dealing with technology workarounds that delayed our projects, or switching to a cloud solution that would require losing the simple and familiar mapped drive process for navigating our files and doing our work.”

Solution: Smart Cloud Enablement for a Smooth User Experience

Richmond connected with Egnyte at an AEC industry event, and he saw how Egnyte presented content in a simple and familiar mapped drive environment, fully equipped with cloud functionality—a file server in the cloud. He left the event with a strong sense that Egnyte was an ideal solution to provide the best of both worlds: cloud-enabling the processes for accessing and managing files—thus driving faster, smoother computational design work than their VPN and local servers ever could—without fundamentally changing those processes from the user perspective.

Egnyte’s platform benefits the RIOS team across multiple fronts:

• Familiar navigation
  “Navigating and accessing files in Egnyte mirrors, to a tee, the way we’ve accessed our files for years,” Richmond explains. “And it’s all in the cloud. Users who log into Egnyte work out of the same drive, no matter where they’re located.” When someone updates a file, their updates are saved automatically and propagate across the drive, with version control facilitating any necessary data restoration. “People used to have to work locally on files, which meant downloading them to their hard drives, making their changes, and reuploading them. These included Adobe files of multiple gigabytes—the re-upload often took hours,” says Richmond. “Now those changes happen within Egnyte, and much faster.”
   
• Centralizing user content and updates
  Automatic updates occur not just with files, but with the code the team uses to run their tools. As Bob Frederick, Director of Computational Design at RIOS, explains: “Most of our tools are written in Python, and having all our Python code sitting on mapped drives lets us manage it in a much more centralized way. When we push a software update, the updated version of the code base propagates across the drive. Our computational designers don’t have to reinstall anything—they can click the same button, in the same place they’ve always found it, and run the latest version.”
   
• Managing AI-generated imagery
  RIOS uses a Stable Diffusion AI server to generate computational design images, and exports those images directly into Egnyte, effortlessly creating an easily accessible image gallery. “The images are stored similarly to how they would be in a Windows server, but the performance is much better,” Richmond explains. “With a large Windows directory of high-resolution image files, those images can take minutes to load. With Egnyte, it’s instantaneous. The team was shocked at how fast it was—some even described it as magic.”

Benefits: A Comfortable and Productive Team, Free of Distractions

Between the fast-paced scaling of the business and sharing and accessing content remotely, RIOS felt they had lost the ability to work the way they wanted: with a focus on quality design rather than technological administration. Since implementing Egnyte, they feel they’ve gotten it all back.

“The challenges we encountered during our international expansion and embrace of hybrid working encouraged us to identify a better technology partner,” says Richmond. “Egnyte brought us back to a more streamlined way of working. We can now complete tasks as quickly as we could when we were all physically together, instead of working around hurdles like learning a new file navigation system, downloading and reuploading content, or managing different local servers.”

Summing up the ways RIOS has benefitted from Egnyte, Frederick adds: “With Egnyte, we get the file server experience we’ve had for the last decade, with all the modern features of a cloud platform. If you’re running a suite of CAD tools and managing lots of computational design files across multiple locations, and don’t want to spend all your energy managing infrastructure and learning new processes instead of advancing your projects, Egnyte is for you.”

With their preferred workflows restored and their technology infrastructure fully optimized, RIOS’s journey with Egnyte is just beginning. “I’d love to make greater use of Egnyte’s web interface, Microsoft Teams integration, and external sharing functionality,” comments Richmond. “Egnyte has worked so well for us that we’re headed in that direction. It’s the one thing our teams across the globe are connected to and can always count on.”

Savills Ireland is a full-service real estate advisory firm with offices in Dublin, Cork and Belfast. With Egnyte in their arsenal, Savills Ireland can now streamline communication and improve collaboration between their dispersed teams. Publicly available data, enhanced with internal business intelligence, is immediately available to distributed users in the cloud, at any time, and from anywhere.

Challenge: Outdated Infrastructure Slows a Distributed Workforce

Savills Ireland sought to provide their 400 hybrid-work employees more immediate access to content at anytime. When CIO Toby Wells arrived in 2016, he found an outdated technology infrastructure with file storage limits and no archiving capabilities for deleted files. Savills needed a way to manage their data and make it available to employees where and when they needed it.

“I found a very traditional infrastructure – desktops everywhere, on-premises email, and Windows file servers across the sites,” said Wells. “The company had ambitions to support a more flexible and secure hybrid working model.”

Anchored to traditional on-premises technology, Savills couldn’t support the needs of a growing and modern workforce. Their Windows 2008 file server had a 4 terabyte file limit, which meant that once a week they would need to delete old files to make room for the new files. And, because they lacked archiving, after 30 days, backups became complex and difficult to retain.

Sharing files across a remote workforce was an even bigger challenge. Smaller files were zipped and emailed, but any files that were too large to email had to be uploaded to a USB drive and delivered by motorbike. Oftentimes, people would lose files in their email or would work from multiple versions of files, resulting in significant rework.

Without the ability to easily access files remotely, employees would resort to storing files on laptops with the inevitable version control issues.

“Every Monday morning I would go to the office and print off whatever material I needed for that week’s site visits,” said Savills Ireland's Director Andrew Sherry. “And if my schedule changed or I forgot something, it was back to the office to print out what I needed.”

Solution: Simple and Secure Access to Content Anytime, Anywhere

Savills chose Egnyte to ensure their employees have access to all the necessary information, regardless of location or device. Improved workflows made tedious tasks a thing of the past and helped to eliminate any confusion about next steps and where documents are stored. Quality assurance processes are now streamlined by having one central version for each document in its dedicated folder - eliminating email attachments flying around with outdated versions.

With previous advertising agency experience, Wells understood the importance of efficiently handling large files. To ensure Savills was able to operate at peak performance and reduce latency, he deployed Egnyte as a cloud-first, but not a cloud-only, solution.

“Cloud-first only works to a point,” said Wells. “Work still needs to get done if people are out on a remote site or on an airplane and don’t have connectivity.” With Egnyte, teams stay connected and up-to-date no matter where they go. When teams go on-site they either upload the documents they need to Egnyte or sync the files to their Egnyte desktop app so they can access them offline. They have the same experience as in the office - making changes, annotating documents, and taking notes are all possible offline with any updates automatically syncing once back online - while global file locking ensures version control measures remain strong and rework is eliminated.

Streamlined workflows, supported by Egnyte’s unique co-editing and collaboration features, are helping field employees do their jobs more efficiently. Employees on the jobsite used to waste time traveling back to the office to perform follow-up scanning and emailing tasks. Now they use iPads to mark up drawings in real-time and automatically save them to the respective job folder, making them immediately available to their colleagues.

“It’s really improved our quality assurance processes. I'll download the documents through Egnyte, make my edits, and then upload it back to Egnyte in the same folder,” said Savills Ireland's Head of Building & Project Consultancy Allen Devine. “It’s no longer the case where we have emails flying around with five different versions of documents. It’s one document stored in one folder.”

Benefits: Reducing Workload Without Jeopardising Quality Of Work

Egnyte’s solution has streamlined operational efficiency at Savills, reducing time spent on tasks and improving the client experience.

“A few weeks ago we had a meeting with one of our clients who was opening a new pub. There were 10 of us in the room and we realised that no one had the material the client had sent with them,” said Sherry. “I was able to very quickly pull it up on the screen and show the documents using the Egnyte app on my iPad. That saved everyone in the room countless hours of going back and forth. I'm a big advocate of how much more efficient Egnyte has made us.”

An additional benefit with Egnyte has been a much quicker job turnaround. Instead of driving back to the office to start the billing process, employees streamline the effort by directly uploading their notes to Egnyte - resulting in shortened billing cycles and quicker revenue realization.

“Instead of waiting for people in the office and going back and forth with edits for a couple of weeks, we can do it in real time,” said Devine. “Now we’re billing a job at the end of the first or second week instead of the end of the month. Our timeline from on-site, to finishing the report, to billing, is considerably shorter."

IT operations have also seen major improvements since the move to Egnyte. “Because it is so easy to use, help desk calls for file sharing and file recovery have been eliminated,” said Wells. “And we don’t need to waste time maintaining a physical server. It frees our resources up to work on more important projects.”

The true test of Egnyte was when the pandemic hit. Savills Ireland quickly distributed laptops with Egnyte loaded on them and sent the teams home to work. “I told them the “e” drive was now the “z” drive and all they had to do was click on that green thing (Egnyte) and they could get to all of their files,” said Wells. “If you look at the man hours saved the first two weeks of the pandemic, Egnyte paid for itself right there and then.”

Recently, Savills Ireland reviewed their data security against internal and external threats such as ransomware, and have implemented Egnyte’s snapshot recovery, which provides at least 90 days’ worth of immutable backups. “We’ve been delighted with the ease of deployment and use of this solution. It adds another critical layer to our systems and defense strategy. We’re looking forward to Egnyte’s next developments in PDF file handling and eSignature capabilities.”

Egnyte has not only modernised how Savills Ireland does business; it has also completely changed the perception of IT. “We have changed IT from being a reactive support function to being a proactive organisation,” said Wells. “We deliver solutions and technology that create efficiencies and improve our security posture. Egnyte is a huge part of that.”

With a project portfolio spanning the construction, industrial, medical and laboratory equipment, oil and gas, and IT sectors, Al-Balagh Trading & Contracting employs thousands of people to manage enormous volumes of data. But with a heavy reliance on local servers, equipping its project sites to manage that data was a slog, and the collaboration processes that connected those sites were broken.

As Al-Balagh’s project portfolio grew, these problems compounded – until Egnyte unified the firm’s data, across all its sites, in the cloud. Since then, site setup and data management have been a breeze, and the firm can scale its operations without slowing down.

Challenge: Siloed Local Infrastructure Hinders Expansion

Every day, at every project site that Al-Balagh operates, numerous stakeholders create, modify, and exchange various project-related files. Establishing the infrastructure necessary to facilitate this work was a multifaceted and time-consuming affair. At each site, the team needed to set up a local server, create folders for document storage and collaboration, and make sure a reliable power source and backup data storage was in place.

“It took us a week, at a minimum, to set up the local server and get all the other infrastructure ready,” says Ajo George, IT Manager at Al-Balagh. “And until that work was complete, the site wouldn’t be operational and people couldn’t start working.” This was a substantial enough bottleneck when the company was only operating six or seven project sites. But amid a period of strong expansion, Al-Balagh found itself confronting these setup delays at each of roughly 15 sites in addition to their head office – adding up to significant lost work hours.

Once a site was finally launched, the team ran into a new problem: with each site relying on its own siloed local infrastructure, there was no efficient, secure way to exchange files among sites and with the head office. These infrastructure silos also made it hard to replicate the firm’s content environment across all sites, creating a confusing lack of standardization. “At best, we were relying on email to send documents back and forth, which is generally not a good practice,” George explains. “At worst, we actually had content saved on CDs and DVDs, and people had to physically come to the office to pick them up. If, for example, we prepared a Request for Quote for a subcontractor, and five people needed to review it, we had to create five different CDs. It was a real drain on our time and resources.”

Solution: Unify All Sites – and Their Data – in the Cloud

Al-Balagh came into contact with Egnyte through an unusual channel: Microsoft. “We initially looked into Microsoft OneDrive to help us streamline site setup and scale our operations, but we struggled to govern access permissions and standardize the folder structure across every site,” George explains. “In the end, Microsoft ended up referring us to Egnyte.”

Egnyte provided a cloud-hosted environment for storing and managing files, eliminating the need for extensive local infrastructure installation at each site and greatly accelerating site startup times. The platform also enabled Al-Balagh to create a single folder structure that stakeholders could access from any project site, and to share files via secure links – all while asserting granular access controls via Egnyte’s permissions management functionality. These features provided needed relief from reliance on email attachments and physical discs.

“The move to Egnyte made it much easier to move users between project sites,” comments Mohamed Kunhi, IT Service Delivery Lead at Al-Balagh. “The folder structure is the same across all sites and projects, so when someone goes from one project to another, they know exactly where to find the data they need. That helps us avoid a lot of onboarding and confusion.”

Some of Al-Balagh’s project sites are located in areas with unreliable internet connections, which makes some clients wary of a file management environment hosted fully in the cloud. Egnyte presented a solution here as well – specifically, its Storage Sync product. As George explains: “In areas where we might not always have internet access, we still use local servers. But Storage Sync automatically syncs the latest version of all our content to the cloud environment as soon as internet connectivity is restored. That means we can still benefit from a centralized, universally accessible content environment, even in these far-flung areas.”

Benefits: Stronger Productivity and a Green Light on Growth

Since transitioning from local servers at each site to Egnyte’s unified, cloud-hosted environment, Al-Balagh has neutralized administrative delays and yielded enormous time savings that can be recycled into its projects. This has made the team more productive and enabled the firm to scale freely without fighting administrative headwinds.

“Thanks to Egnyte, it takes only one day to set up a site vs. a week or more,” says George. “Now that all of our project data, procurement data, RFQs, and everything else is accessible from any location, our subcontractors and other stakeholders can access it much more quickly and easily. It took about an hour for us to create, for example, four discs for four stakeholders. Now we can get those people the info they need in five minutes.”

Al-Balagh is leveraging a wide array of Egnyte’s feature functionality and looking to expand its use of Egnyte into areas such as security and compliance. “Egnyte’s integration with Microsoft facilitates real-time co-editing of Office365 documents, so that multiple stakeholders can work in the same document together. This helps us avoid file duplication and make sure people aren’t working on outdated versions of files,” Mohandas explains. “Looking ahead, we plan to learn more about Egnyte’s features related to ISO 27001 compliance and ransomware.”

All in all, Egnyte has proven to be a major driver of Al-Balagh’s broader digital transformation. The platform has virtually eliminated the firm’s reliance on paper and physical discs for content sharing, and has created a designated channel for document management that exists separately from email – a much more sound business practice. “Users now load their files into Egnyte, and that’s where those files exist from then on,” George explains. “No more photocopying, email sharing, or digital redundancies. Egnyte is our central destination for any content that people need to be able to access from multiple locations. It has helped us keep our processes unified across all our sites, which has paved the way for us to keep scaling our operations.”

Managing major construction projects during a global pandemic is no picnic. It requires dealing with enormous data volumes, facilitating collaboration among myriad stakeholders, and erecting large and complex edifices–all while health restrictions prevent most people from actually meeting on a job site.

After implementing Egnyte’s document management platform, the large UAE-based firm ALEC Engineering & Contracting expertly navigated these challenges, achieving rapid site startup, seamless remote collaboration, and easy management of large files.

Challenge: Project Complexity Outpaces Legacy Software

For ALEC, large and complex construction jobs are the norm, requiring collaboration among hundreds of staffers, often spread across various departments and offices. It also entails managing Revit files up to 11 gigabytes in size.

ALEC’s on-premises file sharing network posed challenges in several key areas when managing these projects:

Extensive project setup
At the start of each project, the system required extensive and time-consuming on-site prep work. “This involved setting up a physical server at each site, installing the necessary software, and building a folder structure for managing files,” explains Najib Dalank, Head of IT at ALEC. “Then we had to secure the necessary storage and establish security policies. And we had to do daily manual content backups on each system to meet the seven-year archival requirements of our projects.”

• Remote document management
  Without cumbersome workarounds, team members could only access the on-premises server while on site. “We had to virtualize machines to enable users to access content using the local network, and if we wanted to share a file with an external partner, we had to download it and then reupload it to a different platform,” Dalank explains. Dewald Smith, Project Director at ALEC, adds: “Even then, sometimes files were so large we had to add them to Dropbox and send them via a link, which would often expire and need to be resent.”
• Outdated documents
  With various stakeholders managing files on multiple local servers simultaneously, it was hard for someone to know if the file they were looking at was fully up to date.

Solution: Unify Dispersed Stakeholders Through Cloud Adoption

The ALEC team evaluated Egnyte as a cloud-hosted alternative to their on-premises file sharing network. “We started with a small proof of concept that went well,” explains Dalank. “We then used Egnyte for a leisure mega-project we would soon be developing.”

Soon after migrating data into Egnyte, it became clear that Egnyte’s cloud infrastructure was the answer to the issues the previous system had created. “Once our content was in the cloud, our team could immediately access both large and small files from anywhere with an internet connection, without the need for VPN connect,” says Dalank. “Content updates were immediately synced, files were automatically backed up, and it was easy to provision the right level of file access to stakeholders based on their role.”

These features were impressive enough. But perhaps what clinched ALEC’s decision to move forward with Egnyte was Egnyte’s Storage Sync product. “We had previously tried other systems but kept running into synchronization issues between cloud and local versions of files, even small ones,” says Dalank. “But we had great synchronization results with Egnyte. We were able to upload and download terabytes of data via Storage Sync, and it worked perfectly.”

As the project moved forward, Egnyte’s cloud infrastructure and file access controls made sharing and collaborating on files easy for internal and external stakeholders alike. As Smith explains: “Staff can access the latest versions of design documents on their iPads rather than printing them out, gathering on site to review them, and hoping they’re still up to date. And we can send subcontractors and clients a link to view all the reports and other materials they need, knowing we have the controls in place to prevent people from accessing the wrong things.”

Describing Egnyte’s impact on project startup, Dalank says: “With everything in the cloud, we no longer had to implement a ton of local infrastructure at each project site. Where it used to take three or four weeks to get everything ready, Egnyte allowed our team to start collaborating in just one day, whether remotely or on location.”

Benefits: A Steady Ship as Project Size and Complexity Grow

In the midst of the mega-project, COVID hit. But with Egnyte’s cloud infrastructure streamlining remote collaboration and file sharing, the project was hardly affected. “Only Operations were allowed to visit job sites during COVID,” Smith explains. “But Egnyte enabled us to keep working together anyway. We could access the cloud remotely and do whatever we needed.”

Dalank adds a note on the team’s experience navigating the Egnyte platform: “The biggest piece of feedback we’ve gotten is that Egnyte offers the same mapped drive experience our users recognized from the previous system. It’s so intuitive for people to find the files they need, which has been a huge driver of user adoption.”

And it’s not just the ALEC team who has benefited. With smoother collaboration, fewer content silos, and stronger business continuity, ALEC’s clients are happier as well. “We’re able to collaborate with clients with more transparency, and that has really built trust and strengthened those relationships,” Smith explains. “We can tell them: ‘Here’s a link you can use to access our platform and all the reports you need.’”

Since the mega-project opened to the public in 2023, Egnyte has been ALEC’s go-to document management system and is currently in use in about half a dozen major projects. ALEC is now looking at myriad other areas in which their partnership with Egnyte could be beneficial. “We’ve already successfully pushed Egnyte for a big project with one of our partners in Saudi and signed a new enterprise agreement for 1,000 licenses with Egnyte, which has been transformational,” comments Dalank. “Now we’re deep in the weeds exploring how Egnyte can serve us in areas from workflows to integrating with Microsoft Teams to AI to information security–we’re going for ISO 27001 compliance in 2024, and Egnyte will be critical for that.”

Summing up his experience, Smith says, “Our projects, and the data involved with them, are always becoming more complex. But with Egnyte, there’s no downtime, or waiting period to access content, or complaining from the team. That makes it easy for us to take on increasingly complex projects more quickly and effectively. If you have a large staff, or people collaborating remotely, or large data volumes, or issues with access controls, Egnyte is the tool for you.”

The fast-growing architectural and design firm BSB Design conducts business across 11 offices across the United States. Since the pandemic, it has also used a hybrid work model, with many employees working remotely. “We have staff still working from home, but others wanted to come back to the office once it was safe,” explains Brendon Good, Systems Administrator at BSB. “Multiply that across 11 offices, and collaboration becomes a bit chaotic.”

Partnering with Egnyte was key to maintaining a cohesive workflow across these various locations. Egnyte’s cloud-hosted content management system serves as the firm’s new center of gravity, unifying its dispersed teams and yielding major dividends in productivity, security, and collaboration.

Challenge: Decentralized Content Management Causes Headaches

BSB manages a wide array of content including, but not limited to, files in Revit, AutoCAD, SketchUp, and Photoshop. With no centralized content management system established across the firm’s 11 offices, BSB used a hodgepodge of platforms to manage these files. “We had Windows on-prem file servers, OneDrive, Dropbox, SharePoint, and a few people using Microsoft Teams,” says Good. “Different offices were using different systems, with at-home team members relying on VPNs to access files stored on those systems. It was the ‘Wild West’ – we often had no idea which system someone was using.

This paradigm – teams in various locations using various systems to manage a large and diverse volume of content – created significant headaches. Good focuses on several challenges:

• Data loss
  With so many systems in place, BSB lacked the bandwidth to universally guarantee file backups. “We controlled the IT and did backups for Windows on-prem, but not Dropbox,” Good explains. “Also, sometimes people working from home would access a file via VPN and download it to their computer to work on it. We don’t back up our staff’s personal computers, so if one crashed, we could lose the latest file version.
• Uncontrolled access
  Some of the systems BSB was using lacked critical access controls. “Staff would share Dropbox or OneDrive files via links with no expiration date and no password protection,” says Good. “As a result, we couldn’t get a handle on who was accessing what data.”
• Slow collaboration
  Stakeholders working within the same server could immediately see any modifications to files on that server. But, as Good explains, “When someone downloaded a file onto their own computer, other stakeholders had to wait for that person to reupload the latest version to the server. That caused a real slowdown.”

These challenges became a major burden for Good and his team. “People in one office often wouldn’t know how to update access permissions to safely share a file with another office using another system, and would come to IT for support,” Good says. “Between that and areas like file recovery, I was drowning in support tickets.”

BSB began looking for a way to unify content management workflows across all offices and at-home workstations into one system. The first solution Good tried, Peer, successfully unified the firm’s 11 offices, but didn’t eliminate remote workers’ reliance on VPN. “We needed a solution that would bring in-office and at-home folks together, working from one platform, with no need for VPNs,” Good explains.

Solution: A Cloud Platform That Checks All Boxes

BSB began evaluating Egnyte’s cloud-hosted platform as a way to create uniformity out of their myriad of systems. “Egnyte was a way to consolidate our sharing platform,” Good explains. “It allowed staff, whether working from home or in one of our offices, to access files from one centralized environment.

During the evaluation, the team drilled down into three key areas:

• Data recovery
  When team members make updates to files in Egnyte, those files are automatically saved in the cloud and can be accessed via Egnyte’s intuitive version control features. “That gave people the flexibility to recover older versions of files themselves rather than going through IT,” says Good. “With our on-prem solution, file backups required a lot of handholding. Egnyte made it easy.”
• Powerful access controls
  Egnyte made it easy for dispersed staff to share and collaborate on files securely. “Egnyte has features that make it much easier to control access, like single-sign-on and the ability to set expiration dates on shareable links,” says Good. “And setting permissions for files and password-protected links is easy enough that people don't have to rely on IT support. While we didn’t want people in one office to have unfettered access to another’s project folders, Egnyte made it easy to adjust those interoffice permissions as needed.”
• Accelerated collaboration
  The cloud-based workflow that Egnyte facilitated essentially freed the team from VPNs and the slowdowns they imposed. “The reason people downloaded files to their hard drives to work on them was that access by VPN was so slow,” Good explains. “Now they can access and modify files directly in Egnyte, and their changes get synced at the speed of their internet. And because everyone is working in this same cloud repository, we don’t have to wait for file changes to replicate across every office.”

Benefits: Smoother Collaboration and a More Productive IT Team

From a collaboration perspective, partnering with Egnyte has made BSB’s 11-office hybrid workforce feel like they’re all “in the same room" working from the same server. Sharing and accessing files is simpler, faster, and completely secure. Content recovery is in the hands of the staff. Workarounds for remote access are rendered unnecessary

“Our staff can work with other offices much more quickly thanks to Egnyte,” Good says. “People no longer need to download files to their own machines or wait for someone to upload the latest version.”

BSB’s new unified content management workflow has dramatically reduced the burden on its IT team. “I used to get about 10 support tickets a day from someone needing access to another office’s file server, or help recovering a file,” says Good. “That has dropped about 80%.” The reduction in support needs has translated to major time savings, which Good is now able to divert away from putting out fires and toward more productive activities. As Good says: “My team has become more project based. We’re working on more projects for the company rather than troubleshooting IT issues.”

BSB doesn’t just plan to keep using Egnyte for active projects. Looking ahead, Good also hopes to use Egnyte’s archival and retention policies to store projects once they’re finished. In the meantime, he’s thrilled at what Egnyte has made possible for his team. “Egnyte has been a hit across the company,” Good says. “Navigating between offices is much easier because we’ve consolidated everything into one secure repository.