Introduction

Like many mid-sized engineering companies, S&ME faces ongoing technology challenges as it tries to keep pace with larger competitors, manage and secure its data, and address changes in the way their employees work.

Core to their struggles was the inability to track project data across the numerous technologies that were being used for collaboration. Employees were running into file sharing limitations that wasted time and slowed productivity, especially with large jobsite files. And clients were increasingly demanding security and compliance controls that their legacy tools simply couldn’t address.

All of these issues were compounded by the fact that S&ME was growing as an organization and looking to win more federal government projects.

“We have a very long history at our company working on small, local, and regional projects. But we’re really trying to evolve so we can handle a much larger, multi-disciplinary, broader scope of projects,” said Chris Headley, director of Corporate Services at S&ME.

As the firm moves to address those goals for the next phase of its evolution, Egnyte has become an increasingly valuable partner in the process

Challenge: Poor User Collaboration and IT Visibility

S&ME struggled with fast, convenient, and secure collaboration across its employee footprint.

The company had close to 90 TB of data stored on file servers across more than 35 office locations, and a mishmash of best-of-breed collaboration and storage technologies, which meant different tools for internal and external file sharing.

This created major problems for users. Teams struggled to work on large data sets like drone video, and they lost time getting field data to the office so others could work on it.

At the same time, S&ME was facing increased pressure to provide better visibility, control, and protection over its clients’ data. Director of IT Michael Farrar started seeing contract language that referenced cybersecurity and federal guidelines like ISO 27001 and NIST SP-800, which started a conversation about the company’s ability to win government contracts in the years ahead.

“How do we answer these questions if we’re nowhere close to meeting these requirements?” Farrar said.

Solution: One Platform for Secure Collaboration

One of the groups within S&ME feeling the pain of downloading and sharing large video files suggested Egnyte as a possible solution. The firm did its due diligence on the Egnyte solution, which included reaching out to IT research and consulting firm Gartner, which counts S&ME as a client.

“We got very good information and a glowing recommendation from Gartner, which gave us the confidence to try Egnyte’s technology stack,” Headley said.

And so they did, starting with the group that brought Egnyte to the table in the first place. Headley described the launch and the customer support as “fantastic.” The platform provided immediate value, so S&ME began working with Egnyte to support other collaboration use cases across the entire employee footprint.

“We saw the value in Egnyte,” Headley said. “It allows us to replace our disparate, outdated technologies and modernize our tech stack. Our Egnyte platform allows us to achieve some new capabilities we were really struggling to achieve.”

From there, S&ME moved its massive trove of unstructured data to Egnyte. This included content like documents, images, and videos. S&ME retained an on-premises footprint but used the Egnyte integration with Truyo to discover and classify content, making Egnyte the single source of project content governance for all departments. IT can now keep tabs on all its data, including proactively discovering and identifying sensitive information like Confidential Unclassified Information (CUI)—meeting the needs of its larger clients.

“Just from the sheer discovery standpoint—Egnyte makes it much, much easier to find information than ever before,” Headley said.

Users can now access all their data quickly as well, knowing the files are all housed within the appropriate project folders. Photos taken on mobile devices can be uploaded to the relevant project folder based on geolocation, keeping them organized and easily accessible. This saves considerable bandwidth and frees employees to get back to business-critical tasks.

Benefits: A Modernized Stack To Tackle the Next Stage of Growth

The engineering market is fairly small, so directors at other firms talk to each other regularly, according to Headley. His peers have referenced other technologies they use to achieve the same goals, but he knows they made the right choice. Specifically, Egnyte made S&ME feel valued, based on a foundation of trust and partnership.

“I would put Egnyte’s customer service at the top of the list when it comes to treating S&ME as a partner, helping us identify and achieve our business goals,” he said.

S&ME’s next big focus is on cybersecurity and data protection, especially as it works with larger, more sophisticated clients. It’s working with Egnyte toward compliance with the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) framework, which has strict guidelines for businesses that work with the U.S. Department of Defense. This will help S&ME earn more business not only with government entities, but also with other AEC firms, energy companies and other potential clients that do business with the federal government.

And while S&ME builds toward CMMC compliance, it’s already reaping benefits from Egnyte’s security and governance capabilities. It uses Content Classification to identify, locate, and secure CUI. S&ME also takes action on unusual activity flagged by Egnyte—such as files with personally identifiable information (PII) stored in the wrong folder or individuals downloading large numbers of files—and creates policies to prevent unauthorized sharing.

“It was shocking how good Egnyte was at picking up where we had data that needed controlled access, such as PII,” said Mark Petersen, Senior Information Systems Security Analyst. “We were completely unaware some of this was in multiple shared drives or where it shouldn’t be, and it helps us corral that and it has a very easy mechanism to fix those issues.”

Moreover, the IT team sees its use of Egnyte as an investment that will pay dividends in the form of new contracts with clients that are increasingly concerned about cybersecurity.

Headley and his team are also looking at Egnyte’s lifecycle management capabilities, which help automate archiving, deletion, and retention of documents. This will reduce the manual effort of project close-out, enabling IT to automate the archival of project data. An additional benefit is the confidence that comes with archiving project data in its entirety in a secure and accessible way, reducing both data storage costs and risk. The team is also considering Egnyte’s capabilities for ransomware detection and file recovery, disaster recovery, and integrations with other business applications.

For a company with a nearly 50-year legacy, it’s a series of baby steps, according to Headley. But with Egnyte as a partner, S&ME is well positioned to take those steps and position itself for another 50 years of success.

“With Egnyte, we feel like we’re in a fantastic spot to continue the evolution of our company to meet new emerging challenges and the needs of our customers,” he said.

Thinkso is a content-driven design and marketing agency based in New York City. From brand strategy and identity design to content creation to website design, Thinkso provides its clients with a one-stop shop for all their marketing needs. When the COVID-19 pandemic forced Thinkso to give up its New York City office space, the management team faced a big challenge—shifting their employees to a remote setup without having an efficient way to access their work files.

Challenge: An Aging Local Server and Fragmented File Location

A local server had been the lifeblood of Thinkso for 14 years, housing all its intellectual property and data. But it had long passed its life expectancy and the company’s designers and project managers were frustrated by the painfully slow transfer times. As Elizabeth Amorose, one of Thinkso’s founders and senior partners, explains, “Our files are the core of our business. They are our work product, so the slow transfer speed was a really big issue.”

Complicating things further were fragmented file locations across the company, with certain file types stored on Google Drive and others on the local server. This made collaboration difficult and inefficient—a major problem for a company where multiple people in different roles work together on one project simultaneously.

Security was also on Amorose’s mind, as she noticed that the vetting process from potential clients was getting tougher. Clients were increasingly concerned about the security of their data, and Thinkso needed a solution that could alleviate those concerns. “We didn’t have an easy way for our internal team to monitor the activity of our local server, and we had heard horror stories about other companies having their servers hacked,” she says. “It was critical that we transition to a secure cloud-based system before getting into a situation where we would lose out on a client project because our server didn’t meet their new security requirements.”

After dealing with these issues and concerns for years, Thinkso’s need for a better file management system finally reached the tipping point. With the company shifting to a fully remote model, logging into the lagging server via VPN would no longer cut it. The Thinkso team needed a solution to their data storage woes, and they needed it fast—a hard deadline loomed for moving out of their office and giving up their server.

After viewing demos of potential cloud-based file management platforms such as Canto and pCloud, Amorose was left feeling defeated, noting that they all seemed both overly complicated and unable to meet Thinkso’s needs. Then a trusted agency partner sent Thinkso the name of a file management software provider they highly recommended: Egnyte.

Solution: A Cloud-Based Platform Built for Speed

With its robust and secure content collaboration features, Egnyte’s Enterprise plan met all of Thinkso’s requirements. Egnyte’s Professional Services Team got to work transferring the company’s more than 910,000 assets to the new system and completed the job in a matter of weeks—well ahead of the deadline they’d been given.

Amorose recalls that her team was blown away by how smooth and quick the transition process was. “It was amazing. The entire implementation took less than a month,” she says. “We didn’t even need formal training, because Egnyte’s platform is so intuitive.”

After Thinkso’s file management system received this much-needed reboot, the reviews from the company’s staff came pouring in—and they were overwhelmingly positive.

“Egnyte is so fast,” Amorose says. “With our old setup, our designers couldn’t work off our server. It was so slow that they had to copy everything over to their desktops. Switching to Egnyte has made a monumental difference in our ability to work quickly and efficiently.”

Egnyte has also addressed Thinkso’s long-standing issue of file fragmentation, providing a centralized solution with seamless integrations. “Before the switch, we had some files on Google Drive and others on our local server,” Amorose explains. “Now with Egnyte, we’ve married the two systems, and it’s made our project managers’ lives so much easier. All the files for a project can be stored together, in one place, providing a comprehensive view and enabling the creative team to easily find what they need.”

Amorose is also relieved that their work and confidential client files are now secure. “Previously, we didn’t have an easy way of monitoring the behind-the-scenes activity of our local server. We had to rely on our external IT team for that,” she says. “We love that Egnyte gives our operations team a bird's-eye view into user activity and file access across our environment.”

Results: Increased Productivity, Profitability, and Company Morale

Switching to Egnyte’s cloud-based system has significantly eased the burden of what could have been a difficult transition—moving from an in-person office environment to fully remote. With its new ability to work within a platform that is fast and simple to use, Thinkso is reaping the benefits.

Thinkso’s designers estimate a 10-fold increase in speed since implementing Egnyte, resulting in 80 hours of time saved each month. “We’re a professional services firm, so time is money,” notes Amorose. “With Egnyte, we’re no longer spending hours each day just downloading or uploading giant files—and we're saving a ton of money as a result.”

She is now confident that Thinkso’s file management system will pass inspection by prospective clients’ cybersecurity teams, increasing the likelihood of landing big-ticket business.

But the biggest reward has been the decreased frustration and increased morale among the agency’s employees who continually rave about their experience using Egnyte. “We had our designers and project managers literally thank us for choosing Egnyte’s platform because their jobs have gotten easier. The speed and ease of use has added significant efficiency to our workflow, and our team is very happy,” says Amorose.

As for future plans, Amorose notes that they’ve barely scratched the surface of Egnyte’s many features, as Thinkso continues to settle into their new virtual setup. The team is eager to explore Egnyte’s other capabilities, including ensuring that everyone’s laptops are backed up to a secure, central location—a necessity now that staff are dispersed across the country.

“Egnyte has exceeded our expectations, and we’ve just gotten started,” Amorose explains.

Challenges

With its client roster growing each year, along with the number of projects the company had in precon or under construction, C.W. Driver Cos. took an organic approach to building its IT infrastructure—adding storage capacity and file-sharing tools as needed. This created three issues: storage, constant need of expensive upgrades, and shadow IT (data silos and backup issues).

Solution

After investigating cloud-based file management solutions, Blaine Crawford, C.W. Driver Cos.' Director of IT, found that Egnyte checked all the key boxes for his company. Egnyte offered a user-friendly interface for file collaboration from any device. It also provided the familiar Windows-mapped-drive format the company’s employees had become comfortable using. And it allowed C.W. Driver Cos. to retire its on-premises data-storage infrastructure and outsource it all to the cloud.

Results

Integrating Egnyte with Autodesk, C.W. Driver Cos. ensures its teams always have the most recent document versions. Because they can access files from mobile devices, superintendents can easily pull up drawings and RFIs in the field. And after replacing on-premises storage with Egnyte’s easy-to-scale cloud solution, the IT team hasn’t had to raise its data storage budget for eight years.

Challenges

Page needed to find a solution to work together more efficiently. With projects that can have an extensive employee team and up to a hundred external consultants located in multiple cities, Page had files spread across various systems and locations, making finding, sharing, and collaborating on files extremely challenging.

Solution

Now, Page’s plan is to take all the content (that is contractually permissible) off their file servers and move it to Egnyte. To date, they have entirely transitioned their Marketing content to the platform and are now focusing on Accounting, Human Resources, and IT. The goal is to get to the point when all new projects begin in Egnyte.

Results

Page was recently awarded a large healthcare project and their use of Egnyte resulted in significant improvements in file sharing, collaboration and data security

Challenges: Going from Analog to Digital

In business for over 50 years, ESA environmental consulting has 21 offices across California, the Pacific Northwest, and the Southeastern United States. ESA clients range from government agencies to non-profit organizations to private industry. ESA scientists, planners, historians, archaeologists, engineers, designers, and technical specialists provide critical thinking, in-depth analyses, and committed follow-through to guide successful policy development and project planning and deliver enduring multi-objective solutions. ESA is 100% employee owned.

The trigger to work with Egnyte began with a casual conversation about “what if” something goes wrong. Headquartered in San Francisco, where there are a lot of earthquakes, ESA needed a way to retrieve content and stay on task. Business continuity needed to be thoroughly addressed.

Before cloud adoption, ESA’s field staff couldn’t quickly transfer data or files. Engineers gathered field data and then traveled back to the office to send information. There was no way to transmit this information digitally from the field. Teams wasted a significant amount of time. In addition, there was the challenge of having 100+ people working on Computer Aid Design (CAD) files. This environment raised a range of concerns related to the capture of data, delivery of information, provision of service to the end-user, security, and continuity. ESA needed a single source of truth to deliver uninterrupted, secure data to the end-user.

With information coming from locations throughout the United States, document control became a challenge. To make matters worse, ESA also utilized a data center that required a lot of maintenance. Large amounts of field data enter BIM-based environmental impact assessment models. The challenge is moving these large amounts of data from the field into the office where the modeling work happens and where teams, often operating from different sites, can collaborate on the data effectively.

Solution: One Source of Truth

As an organization, ESA looks at technology strategically by evaluating whether a tool can make a difference with client satisfaction. It is also important for ESA to partner with software providers.

“The exchange is a journey,” said Spencer Mains, Director of ESAtech, ESA. “Once you go into implementation, ongoing innovation is important. A strong belief and high empathy for the worker and what they endure every day is vital to the success of the digital workplace.”

For Mains, it was a no-brainer to roll out Egnyte as ESA’s single source of truth. Egnyte reduces work stress by providing one location for production and storage. When off-site personnel work on mobile devices and remote desktops, the information ends in the same production environment. Engineering firms can retain their content, comply with contractual obligations, and comply with warranties. With Egnyte, ESA can archive such content and quickly retrieve it when needed.

Egnyte does not stand in the way of business. Collaboration is swift and secure, which helps to ensure success. Mains provides an example: “A colleague contacted me letting me know he had a huge problem. He said, ‘I have to get an ERP done by the end of the week and I don’t know how I’m going to accomplish that.’” Mains offered up the solution. They set up shared space on Egnyte where all 15 people on the team, 5 of them from the client side, could co-edit in real-time the environmental impact review. What normally took weeks was down to a few days. For the ESA team, this event was a paradigm shift.

Security and governance was a deciding factor for partnering with Egnyte. ESA works with clients that require security assurances and service continuity. Today, ESA is able to assure team engagement and project information is secure and business will proceed uninterrupted.

With Egnyte for AEC, ESA’s clients can:

• Access field data and technical documents.
• Collaborate on the production of technical documents easily and efficiently.
• Be assured valuable and sensitive information is secure.
• Be assured services can proceed uninterrupted.

Results: A Heightened Focus on the Customer

ESA is a professional services consultancy with a focus on environmental science, engineering, and architecture. Driven by utilization rates, the less time they spend on administration work, the more time they can deliver for the client. “Eight minutes a day saved from doing administration may not sound like much”, says Mains, “but if you have 400 people, that is a lot of time. And when they use that time on for more intellectual tasks delivering greater value back to the customer, you start to see real results.”

For Mains, it was a no-brainer to roll out Egnyte as ESA’s source of truth. Egnyte reduces work stress by providing a single location for production and storage. Regardless of whether people are working offsite or on remote desktops, the information ends up in the same location. ESA can also obtain archived content within the storage environment within minutes.

Making the change to Egnyte was handled in a deliberate manner. The first step was to migrate content. During the journey, Mains contemplated introducing all the bells and whistles the platform offers. Instinctively, he knew that approach could overwhelm the organization and jeopardize progress. Mains stayed the course with a more pragmatic approach.

This cadence is proving out. Main explains that at some point ESA will reach the advanced user phase. He says, “A lot of people do not realize Egnyte’s capabilities, but it is important to introduce features incrementally.” Today, the ESA IT department’s role has evolved from providing Egnyte tech support to providing education. ESA is teaching people about the appropriate use of Egnyte and how to leverage the software in their daily work practices.

And that push to get employees to buy in is paying off. Mains said he was recently out for a walk when he heard a voice call his name. It was a coworker wanting to buy him a beer. “Hesitantly I agreed, thinking, ‘Where is this going?,’” he said, jokingly. The colleague proceeded to tell him about working from home and using Egnyte, singing the product’s praises. His colleague said it was ,“...fast, snappy, and completely delightful.” “Nine times out of ten, you get comments that things are not working well,” Mains said. “When you get that kind of feedback, you know you are doing the right thing.”

Challenges

On-premises servers requiring multiple systems—and 20 years of data—to manage

Operating since 1988, Riverside had accumulated a large and increasingly complex infrastructure of on-premises file servers and data storage hardware.

As the firm grew—in employee count as well as geographic footprint—the team implemented a range of cloud solutions to enable employees to manage some of their data in the cloud.

Solution

Bringing together data management and governance in an intuitive, unified platform

After researching the industry for data management solutions, Robert Sciaraffo, managing director of technology at Riverside, and his technology team turned to Egnyte’s enterprise platform.

The first selling point was Egnyte’s user-friendly interface, with a visual folder structure familiar to any Windows or Mac user. “The end-user experience was so intuitive that the transition was a nonevent,” Sciaraffo says.

Another reason Egnyte topped Riverside’s list was the platform’s extensive app-integration library. As Sciaraffo notes, the company had been looking for opportunities to connect multiple apps to improve the staff’s workflows, and Egnyte's DocuSign integration was a good example of how that can work.

“With the Egnyte-DocuSign integration, a user can send a signature request to anyone, and when they eSign the document, the signed copy automatically lands in the correct Egnyte folder,” he says.

Finally, Sciaraffo explains, even if there were lingering questions about whether the solution checked every box on their wish list, the Riverside team ultimately found a compelling reason to go with Egnyte regardless. “From a partnership perspective, Egnyte was phenomenal to work with from the very beginning,” he says.

“The pre-sales experience was outstanding. The Professional Services team couldn’t have been more helpful and patient. And even now—after we’ve been a customer for more than a year—our Egnyte Project Management team still calls us regularly to find out if we have any new needs or requests.”

Results

Unlocking workflow efficiencies

As it turned out, though, the Egnyte platform did check all the key functionality boxes on Riverside’s wish list. And today, with the solution deployed across the firm, both Riverside’s business users and the technology team are enjoying many operational improvements, such as:

Faster workflows

With all their files centralized and accessible on the Egnyte cloud platform, Riverside’s staff can easily and safely share content externally. If the files are eligible for sharing outside the firm—which the technology team can also manage through Egnyte—employees can share them directly through their Egnyte environment.

Efficiencies through integrations

With the Egnyte DocuSign integration, Riverside’s employees who need signatures on a regular basis can send them through DocuSign. When the recipient hits the “Finish” button, the signed file automatically lands in the pre-designated Egnyte folder where it belongs.

Reduced costs

With the firm’s file management and sharing needs all handled through the centralized Egnyte environment, Riverside no longer needs additional cloud apps to house its data, or third-party software like the file-locking and encryption tools it used to manage its on-premises file server infrastructure. Egnyte is helping Riverside reduce its software costs as well as the time IT spends managing disparate solutions.

Improved data governance

With Egnyte’s Secure & Govern functionality, Riverside’s IT team has greater ability to protect and control the firm’s data.

Enhanced cybersecurity

Because it signed up for Egnyte’s enterprise platform, Riverside now also has access to a host of machine-learning capabilities for data security, including insider threat detection and zero-day ransomware protection.

Challenges

With a massively distributed team, spread across 21 offices, Alta Planning + Design needed the capability to build the best team for every project, without being limited by geographic boundaries. It wasn’t unusual for individuals across the US, Canada, and Asia with specific skill sets to collaborate on projects.

But, to be productive, remote teams needed to collaborate on the same files and data, such as project plans, large CAD files, and drone imagery, at the same time. And their existing infrastructure was impeding, rather than supporting, cross-site working.

The files people needed were siloed and scattered across a conglomeration of different servers and legacy Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices, all with different permission and access capabilities. This meant that even finding and accessing the files they needed was a manual chore, taking up critical time when they could have been working.

When users created or revised a file, problems mounted. With no central control or governance of content, users could unknowingly work on an outdated or duplicate file, or overwrite a colleagues’ work if two people were in a file simultaneously. This meant additional wasted hours, less productivity, and more frustration for everyone.

If someone accidentally deleted a file, there was no easy way to recover it, without waiting helplessly for individual vendors who developed the file in the first place to fix the issue.

Sharing files was yet another headache. Often, Alta’s project team needed to move the latest plans and 3D models from one server to another, but slow transfers wasted valuable project time. And when the user receiving the file had low bandwidth, the wait was even longer. Sometimes, files would be corrupted and they would have to start over.

Alta’s small IT team was also feeling the pain. With systems so disconnected, they had no central oversight on who was accessing what data, making the job of data protection, compliance and threat prevention virtually impossible.

Plus, they were spending so much time assisting with issues like data access and storage, that they had less hours in the day to ensure valuable intellectual property wasn’t getting into the wrong hands.

Alta urgently needed a consolidated platform that would improve visibility, collaboration, and content control across every project. A solution that would boost the speed and quality of projects—and create even more customer satisfaction.

Solutions

Deploying Egnyte, where every file can be identified and controlled, so users can securely access any content, anywhere, on any device.

Alta evaluated 11 potential solutions and quickly shortlisted three. They loved Egnyte, but had one issue; the platform didn’t have a ‘sync timer’ to show how long data migrations would take. As soon as they raised it, Egnyte responded, and engineered the exact tool they needed in days!

This extra layer of attention and customer care left a lasting impression and Alta knew Egnyte was the partner for them.

Thanks to Egnyte’s hands-on training and support, Alta migrated all 21 offices and 225 people from their cumbersome file infrastructure into Egnyte, creating a single source of truth in just two months.

Alta was already using tools such as GIS, AutoCad and Adobe Creative Suite and Egnyte seamlessly integrated with those existing investments. This safeguarded the flow of content across every app Alta uses.

Alta also quickly migrated every previously disconnected file into Egnyte’s platform, including from their legacy NAS devices, meaning all their content now lived in one place—Egnyte.

Suddenly, the security and control of content became simple and seamless for Alta’s IT team. With all valuable intellectual property now centralized in a single location they could keep content secure and correct permission and access issues in just a few clicks.

Meanwhile, employees could finally collaborate without friction, finding any resource they needed in seconds. And because Egnyte automatically syncs updated files in the background, users were always accessing the latest information—a critical requirement for effective collaboration and productive projects.

With Egnyte, users could also collaborate on projects globally with ease. Regardless of their geographic location, or the device or infrastructure they were using, team members could work on the same documents.

The platform also eliminated the problem of duplicating or overwriting work and made the frustration of deleted files a thing of the past, with the platform empowering users to retrieve lost information for themselves.

All the friction between collaborators that had been caused by poor connectivity and lack of access was gone—making key workflows instantly more streamlined and efficient.

Results

$220k+ saved every year and projects delivered 10% more efficiently.

Because Egynte reduces data access times so dramatically company-wide, the average billable user saves at least 30 minutes a day because they are no longer hunting for files. This saves the business approximately $91k a year.

The efficiencies they gain in collaborating and co-editing saves an additional 15 minutes a day per user, adding another $45k in savings.

Those 45 minutes a day of combined time savings enable Alta’s teams to work more quickly and effectively, and deliver projects 10% more efficiently.

Alta also significantly reduces its technical support costs thanks to Egnyte. For example, by consolidating all their storage into the platform, they reduce the IT management costs associated with multiple data silos by $81.5k a year. The business also eliminates support costs for Network Attached Storage devices (NASs) throughout Alta, saving a further $3.2k per year.

Meanwhile, the IT team has cut the time it spends on manual chores like managing and fixing issues, or assisting access, by 40%. With all data now stored within Egnyte, the IT team has reduced the number of backup methods and protocols from six to three. All of this equates to considerable time and resources back in their schedule to focus on more innovative projects, while Egnyte takes care of improving data visibility and control, while mitigating data risks for them.

Overview

In a competitive real estate development space, Lewis Group needed to maximize the productivity of its teams. Yet its existing file management infrastructure was slowing everyone down: it didn’t offer remote access to the files teams needed and when they were in the office, locating, moving, and syncing files was seriously sluggish.

Everything changed when Egnyte came onboard. With every file now easily accessed from a single platform and secure remote access made simple, productivity skyrocketed, projects accelerated, and direct costs fell by 66%.

Challenges

Lewis Group’s employees needed fast access to critical files, such as architectural plans and project documentation. Unfortunately, their existing file management system provided no remote access, so unless they were in the office, they couldn’t access, share, or collaborate on essential content. Even when they were at their desks, locating files on the network, moving large files around, and syncing were all agonisingly slow.

Solution

With Egnyte onboard, remote and office-based users can easily access and collaborate on files of any size, on any device, even when they’re offline, which improves productivity and relationships with clients and vendors. Egnyte’s central hub of visibility and control also eliminates the frustrations of backend file administration for IT.

Results

Switching to Egnyte has cut Lewis Group’s direct costs by 66%. And with 600 staff saving at least 30 minutes a day with Egnyte, Lewis Group has unlocked an incredible 300hrs of extra capacity across the business daily!

Challenges

As Les Mills expanded into cities in Asia, Europe, North and South America, Mike Mason, Global Infrastructure Tech Lead, found himself regularly traveling the world standing up Exchange servers, file servers, backup and recovery systems, and VPNs to support the collaboration needs of its distributed workforce.

Solution

Mason decided to bring a cloud-first approach to Les Mills and its file services. He rolled out Egnyte globally in 2014, established a single source of truth and consolidated multiple content repositories into a centralized, flexible, and secure cloud environment. In 2020, with team members working from home, Les Mills brought more workout content online and shifted focus to the on-demand side of the business to meet customer needs.

Results

• Les Mills needed to very quickly shift focus, reduce operating costs and focus on the areas of the business that would lessen the impacts of Covid-19.
• Les Mills has about 100TB of data and took quick advantage of Egnyte’s AI-powered lifecycle management capabilities to identify 1.6M duplicate files across their environment.
• To solve this growth in storage, they have created retention, archive, and deletion policies that lowered storage costs and reduced risk exposure.