No More Workarounds: How ESi Unified 500TB of Project Data and Built Enterprise AI on Top
A forensic engineering leader at the intersection of AEC, litigation, and media.
Key Benefits With Egnyte
- Instantaneous data access: Eliminated significant sync delays from Nasuni, allowing project teams to access and move large files immediately across all locations and devices.
- Single source of truth: Achieved what seven years of prior platforms could not—one governed, real-time file environment for all 20,000+ active projects.
- Unlimited project permissioning: Broke through Active Directory’s ~1,100 security group ceiling, enabling real-time project-level least privilege permissions at scale across 100,000+ projects.
- AI-ready governance: Established a compliant, governed data foundation to support a production AI program built on 30 years of expert forensic knowledge.
Where AEC Meets Litigation
Engineering Systems Inc (ESi) is not a typical AEC firm. It operates at the intersection of three industries:
- AEC, where its civil, structural, and architectural work mirrors traditional engineering practice
- Legal, where its engineers serve as expert witnesses for defense attorneys, insurance carriers, and in-house counsel
- Media, where a visualizations team of more than 25 people produces photorealistic 3D demonstratives and trial exhibits that shape how juries understand complex cases
That intersection changes everything about how ESi’s data must be managed. Every CT scan, drone flight, laser scan, and photographic archive is legally consequential evidence. It must be governed, traceable, and defensible. Sync delays, access inconsistencies, and shadow files aren’t inconveniences—they’re liabilities.
With more than 100,000 past projects, 20,000 active projects, and roughly 500TB of data under management, ESi needed a platform that could match its scale to replace the fragmented stack it had used for years.
Seven Years Chasing a Single Source of Truth
When Matt Jeske, Senior Director of IT, joined ESi seven years ago, his mandate was simple: Get the firm to one governed file environment. What followed was a journey through on-premise servers, SharePoint, and eventually a hybrid model built on Nasuni—each step forward revealing new limitations.
Nasuni’s sync behavior was unpredictable. Heavily collaborative project teams across sites could look at different versions of the same file with no reliable sense of when data would resolve. But the deeper problem was structural. Nasuni’s Kerberos and SMB permissioning model ran through Active Directory, which imposes a hard ceiling of approximately 1,100 group memberships per user.
For a firm where every project has a unique set of participants—and engineers work across dozens of projects simultaneously—that ceiling was a genuine operational constraint. Adding a user to a new project required a machine reboot or sign-out to refresh permissions. Removing friction from access management wasn’t optional—it was foundational.
Nasuni also never fully replaced SharePoint. Certain workflows, such as real-time document collaboration and reliable off-line, on-the-go access still required it, meaning ESi was running two systems in parallel—the opposite of a single source of truth. That was the deciding factor.
A Compliance Environment That Tolerates No Shortcuts
The Egnyte Transformation
Permissioning Without Limits
Cross-Platform and Mobile
Single Source of Truth—Finally
From File Platform to AI Foundation
The Bottom Line
