How Red Bull Reimagined File Sharing for 20,000 Users

Challenges

The company operates as one global community. Prior to Bull Drive’s launch, individual users and teams had been sharing files through a variety of localized and private methods, such as office-based file servers, email attachments, and Box and Dropbox accounts.

As a result, there was no centralized place to find and access Red Bull’s diverse document and content assets – which range from presentations and spreadsheets, to movies and artwork, to music and games, to iconic cartoons.

File access had to be made easy for not only office-based staff but also thousands of remote Red Bull Musketeers and Strikers (brand ambassadors) who build and maintain Red Bull’s brand image in places like bars, restaurants, and nightclubs, and represent the brand to retail customers and store owners.

What’s more, with thousands of people needing to access files across more than 300 different offices at all hours of the day and night – often from remote venues and devices – Red Bull’s lean IT team could not possibly provide support at high volumes to users in all places and time-zones. The solution needed to be not only centralized and secure, but also easy and intuitive, with minimal training and administration overhead required.

Solution

Built on Egnyte’s cloud-based platform, Red Bull launched Bull Drive in 2013, giving users fast and flexible file sharing capabilities globally.

Everyone from office-based employees to field force teams to partners can access content from this central source at their fingertips – anytime, anywhere, on any device. Egnyte’s numerous integrations with tools like OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams, and Office Online make it easy to collaborate and co-author documents in applications like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, without having to move files in and out of Bull Drive or create duplicate copies.

From an admin perspective, IT can easily provision users, govern data, and control security and privacy settings such as user-based access management, device management, and granular permissions at the folder and subfolder level. This ensures that the right employees have access to the right files, and no one has access to files they shouldn’t.

When users share files outside the corporate network with partners, customers, vendors, or retailers, they can easily send out fully customizable links, while IT maintains centralized visibility and control. Red Bull’s IT team can even limit users (internal and external) from allowing access to non-authorized parties, set expirations dates on when links and files can be viewed, downloaded, or edited, and monitor for unusual activity.

Results

Red Bull IT rolled out Bull Drive globally to around 10,000 users in less than three months. Users were trained via video and could be up and running in minutes. Bull Drive quickly replaced the local storage for thousands of employees in only the first year of operation.

Today, there are more than 20,000 users on Bull Drive – which synchronizes files everywhere – across desktop and mobile storage, the web, and even on-premises appliances enabling fast upload and download speeds for teams working over a Red Bull local network. The adoption and productivity benefits continue to increase every year, with minimal admin required by IT.

The volume of data stored on Bull Drive has grown to more than 500 TB as more users create, upload, and share more content, including rich media content.

As these data volumes have grown, Red Bull’s IT team is now using Egnyte’s turnkey lifecycle management capabilities – powered by built-in AI – to automate the business processes behind the retention, archiving, and deletion of files. This enables Red Bull IT to manage storage costs and reduce content risks over time, while also helping users by minimizing unnecessary clutter on the system.

Well before the COVID pandemic struck, Red Bull was able to support remote teams with secure access to the content they need to be productive. During the pandemic, as the company went fully remote, Red Bull was well prepared and able to stay ahead of the competition (and grow) even during challenging times.