Lionakis is a multidisciplinary firm specializing in architecture, engineering, planning, and interiors. Founded in 1909 by California’s first State Architect, the firm takes on large projects for private and public-sector clients.

To provide these clients with top-tier services, it’s critical for Lionakis to maintain a high level of workforce efficiency, business continuity, and content security. The firm achieves these goals with Egnyte’s cloud-based content management system. Egnyte enables Lionakis to meet faster project timelines, strengthening the firm’s reputation as a leader in its field.

Challenge: Cloud-Enable Content Management Workflow

Prior to Egnyte, the team used an on-premises Windows server to store, manage, and collaborate on project-related files. But the lack of cloud functionality impeded their workflows and posed significant risk in several areas:

• Disaster recovery
  As an AEC firm, Lionakis is constantly interacting with clients, consultants, and contractors. These conversations yield significant plan changes and time-sensitive decisions. If a natural disaster were to knock the Windows server offline, work would grind to a halt. “We’ll have a whole construction crew who can’t move forward until they hear from us about a new directive stored on a file on the server. If we can’t access those files, we could lose over a month of work,” explains Matthew Onken, IT Director at Lionakis. “That could do real reputational damage.”
• Remote collaboration
  Lionakis’s workforce is dispersed across offices and construction sites throughout California. To minimize project delays, it was critical that team members be able to communicate across geographies and access files in the field as efficiently as possible. “The Windows server turned field visits into a slog. There was a ton of latency, and folks had to rely on VPNs to access the files they needed,” says Onken. “An architect would have to photograph a jobsite on their phone, return to the office, plug in the phone, download the photo, and load it into the network. All of that, just to get one photo cataloged.”
• Onboarding acquired firms
  Acquisitions are a core pillar of Lionakis’s growth strategy. Each time a company is acquired, it needs to be integrated into Lionakis’s file sharing ecosystem–a process that was slow and clunky with the Windows file server. “We needed a better way to get acquired companies’ files onto our network,” Onken says.

Solution: Move Data from the Local Windows Server to Egnyte

Onken looked into the Egnyte cloud platform, and quickly determined it would be the ideal partner for Lionakis in its cloud enablement journey. “I liked Egnyte right away. It was easy to use, had a well-designed interface with great features, and could process large files really quickly and smoothly,” Onken says. That ease of use made for an incredibly smooth implementation process. “I wish all new technologies were as easy to implement as Egnyte,” comments Kristina Williams, Director of Design Technology at Lionakis. “We had excellent support, no headaches, and everything just worked great.”

Working with Egnyte’s Professional Services, the team started migrating data from their on-premises server into Egnyte. “We migrated 16 terabytes of data in less than two weeks, with no missing data,” says Onken. From there, managing and collaborating on files of all sizes and types became exponentially easier. “Our designers loved that they could work on large Adobe Creative Suite files directly through the Egnyte drive,” Onken says. “It’s amazing how well the system performed, especially over long distances, considering the size of these files.”

By empowering the team to store, manage, and collaborate on files in the cloud instead of locally, Egnyte paved the way for efficient, uninterrupted workflows, regardless of any unforeseen events or physical distances among their dispersed stakeholders. “When we load files into Egnyte, they go straight to the cloud, so even if our local technology is disabled, our team can still access their files and keep working,” explains Onken. “And architects at remote construction sites can load and access files instantly–no VPN necessary.” Egnyte’s disaster recovery abilities extended beyond natural occurrences like floods or fires. As Onken says: “I was impressed with Egnyte’s data governance tools and ability to recover from ransomware attacks, which you don’t often see on a typical local file server.”

Lionakis uses multiple technology products, and so it was critical that Egnyte work well with the rest of its stack. “Our team really appreciated Egnyte’s third-party integration capabilities, particularly with Microsoft Office,” says Onken. “And Revit worksharing for files outside of BIM 360 and Autodesk Construction Cloud on Egnyte has been seamless.” Egnyte’s Storage Sync product enabled the team to cloud-enable their workflows in Newforma, a critical software partner that often doesn’t work well with cloud-hosted file management systems. “Storage Sync allowed us to sync our files down from the cloud and present them just like a Windows SMB file server would, so Newforma could work with it,” says Onken. “People could store files in Egnyte and have them indexed in Newforma. That’s unique among cloud-based content management products I’ve seen.”

Benefits: Disruption-Free Content Workflows Powered by the Cloud

Thanks to the efficiency and business continuity Egnyte has facilitated, clients know that working with Lionakis means faster services and no unpleasant surprises. “Egnyte has unlocked tons of time savings that add up to condensed project timelines. That strengthens our competitive advantage,” says Onken. “It used to take forever for people in satellite offices to open PDFs shared from our local server in Sacramento, but with Egnyte, it’s instantaneous. And we don’t have to waste time connecting to VPNs just to do our work.”

Field architects and designers can now upload photos and other documents to the system in seconds without having to return to the office–a new efficiency that benefits stakeholders in other areas such as design. “We love the rapid photo upload feature from mobile phones directly to our mapped drives,” Williams says. “Egnyte has enabled us to move 100% of our design production files to the cloud.”

Onken’s disaster recovery concerns have all but vanished in the wake of the team’s switch to Egnyte. He now has confidence that neither disaster nor human error can significantly impede the team’s ability to move projects forward. “I’m sleeping much easier now that I know work can continue even in the event of a flood or fire,” Onken says. “Even if someone accidentally deletes an important file, I can just use Egnyte’s search tool to find and restore it.”

Egnyte’s Storage Sync product, in addition to solving the Newforma issue, has facilitated the acquisitions that are so central to Lionakis’s growth. “When we acquire a company, we no longer have to fret about how we’re going to connect all the different networks,” explains Onken. “Storage Sync gives us an easy answer. We can use it to capture all the data from the acquired firm and sync it right up to Egnyte.”

Lionakis CFO Andy Deeble is seeing tremendous business value. "More than ever, to effectively serve our clients and fulfill project requirements, our teams need to work effectively across multiple locations. The flexibility Egnyte provides our business is foundational to maintaining connectivity across the firm and eliminating geographic constraints as we pursue our growth objectives.

Looking ahead, Onken plans to keep educating the team on the myriad ways Egnyte can enhance their workflows. “Egnyte does so much,” Onken says. “There’s always more to discover.”

Sila Services, a mid-sized HVAC, plumbing, and electrical company, has a strong record of attracting high-value capital investments to elevate their business. After the private equity firm Dubin Clark acquired the company in 2019, Sila boosted its valuation through the acquisition of several additional companies.

Engaging in mergers and acquisitions at this level requires a tremendous amount of due diligence involving extensive review of documentation, from legal, to environmental, to HR. Guided by their managed services provider, Network Coverage, Sila leveraged Egnyte to develop an easy, cost-effective, and secure workflow for the exchange of acquisition data.

Challenge: Inefficient Data Exchange Imperils Acquisition

Steve Zimmerman worked as Chief Information Officer for several platform companies owned by Dubin Clark until the acquisition of Sila Services, at which point he was put in charge of IT at Sila as CIO. With experience both in IT and private equity, he knows how critical – and challenging – the due diligence process is ahead of an acquisition.

“We’ve purchased 21 companies. In each case, we had to review their IT platform, payroll info, financial statements, and myriad other documents spread across Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint decks, you name it,” Zimmerman explains. “When we first began making these acquisitions, we had to pay to access this information through a secure data room provided by a third party. Doing this for each acquisition would have been cost-prohibitive.

To bypass the third-party data rooms, the team tried using VPNs to connect each acquired company’s file server and directory to Sila’s Citrix instance. But this created headaches of its own: “To adjust access permissions to a document, we’d have to go through cumbersome, time-consuming manual processes like writing a Group Policy Object,” says Dustin Krauss, Director of Service Operations at Network Coverage.

This permissions issue was critical. “There’s a lot of scrutiny around security during acquisitions,” Zimmerman explains. “We’re dealing, potentially, with people’s personal health and financial information. Plus, companies typically want to be discreet about their ongoing acquisition activity.”

Solution: Build a Secure Portal for Exchanging Data in Egnyte

The Sila Services and Network Coverage teams evaluated Egnyte’s content management system, conducted a rigorous cost-benefit analysis, and concluded that Egnyte was ideal for facilitating communication in M&A situations. “Several of our clients already used Egnyte,” Krauss says. “So I’d seen how effective it is for file sharing and collaboration.”

Zimmerman struck a similar note regarding Network Coverage: “Dubin Clark had had successful experiences with Network Coverage at several of our subsidiaries. I knew I could trust their IT recommendations at Sila.”

Sila set up Egnyte as a secure, centralized, cloud-based data portal where the variety of stakeholders in an acquisition can quickly upload and review all the information. “The portal served as the go-to place for parent companies and subsidiaries, as well as attorneys and auditors, to load and review documents,” says Zimmerman.

The team programmed the Egnyte system to send real-time email notifications to internal and external stakeholders each time someone uploaded a relevant document for review. This allowed everyone to stay apprised of developments during the acquisition. As Zimmerman explains: “Our partners want to see progress. An acquisition can take months to complete, and these alerts help move the review process along. If, say, a document indicates a company carries high insurance costs and thus calls the acquisition into question, we want that document to be seen sooner than later.”

After uploading the data, Sila leveraged Egnyte’s granular access permissions functionality to keep that data secure and ensure that only the proper stakeholders can access it. As Zimmerman explains: “I can give someone access to a particular document, but limit that access to a specific folder or set of folders within a data room, rather than an all-or-nothing situation.” This allowed Sila to further engage in M&A activity while maintaining the proper guardrails around sensitive personal and proprietary information.

All the while, the Egnyte platform has offered an intuitive user experience – a major benefit for less tech-savvy users. “Once we built the portal, all we had to do was send out invitations to people we wanted to give access to,” says Zimmerman. “And Egnyte makes it easy for individuals of all IT skill levels to upload all sorts of data.”

Benefits: The IT Workflow Necessary for Successful Acquisitions

Egnyte has empowered Sila to ensure that all of their information is well-organized and secure, which is critical for successful M&A. “Parent companies want to know where all of the information is stored, whether it’s secure, and how it’s broken down,” says Zimmerman. “With Egnyte, we were able to store all our data safely within a single set of repositories in the Egnyte environment, instead of some information existing on one server, some on another, and some in the cloud.”

“When companies get acquired and then acquire others, they need to integrate as fast as humanly possible,” adds Eric Tomah, Chief Information Officer at Network Coverage. “Leveraging Egnyte’s SaaS-based platform has made the integration effectively seamless for Sila.”

Zimmerman places Network Coverage at the heart of Sila’s IT success story: “Our IT environment across a number of acquired companies, as well as our IT corporate platform, is managed by Network Coverage, and we would not have partnered with them if we weren’t certain they could get the job done. As we expand across multiple geographies, Network Coverage supports that expansion seamlessly.”

Since implementing Egnyte, Sila’s use of the Egnyte platform has grown to cover virtually their entire portfolio. “Thousands of individuals have received invitations to load documentation into the Egnyte portal and have never faced difficulties in doing so,” says Zimmerman. “The data is encrypted, secure, and has never been compromised.”

Tomah looks back on how far the team has come: “The secure portal we helped Sila build with Egnyte is now the primary engine running their acquisition services. It’s a huge win for everyone involved.”

As the owner of signature commercial properties on both the East and West Coasts, Paramount, a leading real estate investment trust, is responsible for storing, managing, and reporting on terabytes of real estate records at any given time.

Partnering with Egnyte, Paramount seamlessly migrated their files from an on-premises file server to a cloud-hosted solution fit to handle these large volumes of complex data. As a result, they realized benefits in security, collaboration, and regulatory reporting — all while maintaining a top-notch user experience.

Challenge: Large Content Volumes Require Cloud-based Efficiencies

Managing Paramount’s real estate portfolio involves a lot of complex record-keeping. “When you own a two-million-square-foot building, there’s a lot going on,” comments Todd Januzzi, SVP, Chief Information and Technology Officer at Paramount Group. “There are multiple cell providers and internet providers in the building, and we keep all of those license agreements. We also keep every closing document, lease, invoice, insurance document, and SEC document, to name a few.”

To store these documents, Paramount relied on an on-premises file server. But storage was just one part of the equation—the team also needed to share and collaborate on files with internal and external stakeholders, control access to the information the files contained, and give regulators visibility into the content lifecycle.

Januzzi started looking for a cloud-hosted replacement for the on-premises server, with a particular focus on:

• Security and access controls
• Collaboration
• User experience

The team tried several cloud-hosted solutions, including Box, ShareFile, and Microsoft OneDrive — all of which fell short. “These systems were often tough to administer, and the performance was poor,” explains Januzzi. “Syncing was slow and confusing; people would inadvertently be looking at outdated versions of files because the current version hadn’t yet synced from their desktops to the cloud.” The team also struggled with the cloud-hosted systems their partners were using, particularly in the AEC space. “Our AEC partners tend to live and die by Dropbox,” Januzzi says. “The only problem is that most of the phishing campaigns we’ve seen are from Dropbox. So we didn’t feel comfortable with that either.”

Solution: Full Control and a Smooth User Experience with Egnyte

During a front-to-back test of Egnyte’s functionality, Paramount discovered that the system outperformed other cloud solutions across the board, especially in their highest-priority areas:

• Security and access controls
  Given the sensitivity of Paramount’s content, it’s essential that their system provide control over who can access content and how. Egnyte empowered Paramount to set access permissions at a highly granular level, controlling who could view, modify, and delete files — all while virtually eliminating reliance on IT. As Januzzi explains: “We love that Egnyte enables the owner of a folder to grant rights to that folder versus putting in a support ticket to have an IT administrator do it. We have a small IT staff, so this is a really powerful time- and effort-saver.”
• Collaboration
  Facilitating seamless remote collaboration was essential for Paramount. “We work with a lot of AEC vendors on plan work and architectural submissions, which require input from attorneys, IT consultants, property managers, and others,” explains Januzzi. “With Egnyte, we don’t have to send Word documents to a dozen people over email and make new versions each time something is changed. We can all work off one version, which updates in real time, and which we can share via secure links.”
• User experience
  Egnyte appeared on Paramount’s servers as a mapped drive letter, just like their previous on-premises system, easing the learning curve and allowing the team to preserve the workflows they were accustomed to. “While it’s much more secure and efficient, the experience in navigating the system is actually similar to on-prem,” explains Januzzi. “The user experience as a whole with Egnyte is second to none. Whether you’re using a file explorer environment or web or mobile, it’s totally seamless.”

Once the team decided to move forward with Egnyte, it was easy to migrate their files from the previous system. “Egnyte’s migration tool is the best I’ve seen,” says Januzzi. “And onboarding is super quick and easy. When a new user comes in, the system automatically pushes them into the content drives they need to access, via an integration with Okta.”

Benefits: Happy Users, Easy Data Management, and Audit Readiness

When Paramount Group launched with Egnyte, they had 5 terabytes of data on their local drive. Since then, the team has migrated 90% of those files into Egnyte and are full-speed-ahead on completing the migration. All the while, Egnyte has delivered a user experience that has resulted in swift, 100% platform adoption among the Paramount team.

Januzzi explains how the user experience has made it easier to manage Paramount’s large and growing portfolio: “With Egnyte, we can create a standard, templatized folder structure and apply that to every building we buy. Every building is different, but this allows us to manage the related documents the same way. So if a property manager switches from one building to another, they don’t have to get acquainted with a whole new file structure. This is huge for owners of multiple properties like us.”

All-In on Egnyte

As for whether Paramount would consider other leading content management systems, Januzzi doesn’t mince words: “We do not allow Dropbox at Paramount, only Egnyte,” he says. “Egnyte is superior for sensitive content detection, detecting ransomware, collaborating on files, user experience, and the rest — full stop. A lot of AEC vendors will send us a Dropbox link, and we’ll have to tell them, sorry, but to work with us, you’ll have to use Egnyte.”

For the construction management firm John Moriarty and Associates (JMA), effective collaboration is the key to success. The firm’s myriad projects depend on the ability of multiple stakeholders, in offices and in-the-field sites across the country, to share and co-edit large construction documents quickly and at any time.

With the support of their managed service provider, Network Coverage, JMA implemented Egnyte to manage and collaborate on these files, moving away from an on-premises file server hosted by Windows. As a result, they neutralized a host of challenges in data capacity, version control, cybersecurity, and beyond.

Challenges: Local File Server Hobbles Remote Collaboration

JMA typically tackles large, intensive projects such as high-rise residential buildings or complex healthcare facilities. Large construction projects involve large construction documents, with multiple dispersed stakeholders making frequent updates to files as projects progress. “We’ll have construction workers and architects in the field, as well as folks in the office, all collaborating on massive, 400-page building plans,” explains Ted Neary, Information Technology Manager at JMA. “When we were using a Windows file server, any time a field worker needed to access a file or view an update, they would have to go to the on-site trailer to either make their updates or connect to the Windows system via VPN to get the updated version. It was a real time suck.”

Eventually, between the proliferation of file versions and the sizes of the files themselves, storage capacity on the Windows system became a concern. “We were constantly having to work with JMA to invest in more infrastructure and storage hardware,” says Eric Tomah, Chief Information Officer at Network Coverage.

Even worse, the Windows server provided no way for the team to exchange files between the office and in-the-field workers—a frequent necessity in a collaboration-intensive industry like construction management—other than via email attachments. This was both impractical given the enormous file sizes the team worked with, and unacceptable from a security perspective. “The size of the attachments through emails was really limited,” comments Neary. Tomah adds: “If a subcontractor or a worker in the field needed a document from the office, they’d have to receive it as an attachment, download it locally, and open it. This was really time-consuming, and posed a big security risk, as you’re basically at the mercy of your email provider and whatever encryption they do, or don’t, have.”

Solution: Replace Windows with Egnyte’s Cloud-Based Solution

JMA met with Network Coverage to explore a cloud-based alternative to Windows, one that could facilitate smooth and secure collaboration without capacity and versioning roadblocks. “We met with JMA regularly to provide strategic guidance in areas like technology and cybersecurity,” says Tomah. “Through these dialogues, it became clear that Egnyte, a solution we’d vetted for years and recommended to other clients, was best suited to address the issues JMA was facing.”

“We actually interviewed a number of Network Coverage’s other clients to see how they like Egnyte,” adds Neary. “They all spoke glowingly about it.” Network Coverage played a strong role in getting JMA set up on Egnyte, leading the team through planning and implementation and providing post-migration support.

Once the team was up and running, they leveraged several key aspects of Egnyte’s functionality to facilitate efficient, secure collaboration:

• Security and governance
  As files moved among project stakeholders, the team knew they would need to take steps to prevent in-transit cyberattacks and data loss. “We introduced Egnyte’s security and governance features as part of our loss prevention strategy,” comments Tomah. “This provided alerts into potential threat actor activity. Egnyte handled all of the administration, infrastructure, updates, and availability, and it’s all centralized in the cloud, so we weren’t beholden to potentially faulty hardware.”
• Link sharing
  With their files stored in the cloud, JMA could now share and access content via password-protected links, relieving their local data storage capacity challenges and eliminating their reliance on bulky email attachments. File updates automatically synced to the cloud, so that each link always showed the latest version. “With Egnyte, the ability to send links directly to subcontractors gets rid of the limited email attachment problem,” explains Neary. “If field workers need to look at, say, one specific office on the 30th floor of a skyscraper, they can pull the plan up instantly on their iPads, rather than wait for an email attachment that might be out of date by the time they get it. That’s just huge.”
• Integration
  Like many firms in their field, JMA included the construction software provider Newforma as an integral part of their tech stack for sharing, accessing, and managing documents. Network Coverage worked with the Product teams at both Egnyte and Newforma to integrate the two platforms using Egnyte’s Public Cloud Connector. As Tomah explains: “This allowed Egnyte to function as a storage provider for Newforma, which offered a lot of flexibility in how JMA accessed the data they needed.”

Benefits: Better Collaboration and a Stronger Competitive Position

Under the guidance of Network Coverage, JMA has leveraged Egnyte to collaborate more efficiently, ensure data security, and strengthen their reputation among their clientele. “With Egnyte’s security and governance features, not to mention their reporting, auditing, and permissions management functionality, JMA is much better protected against data exfiltration and can have peace of mind when sharing data internally and externally,” says Tomah.

“Having a way for people in various geographic areas, both in the office and in the field, to share files and quickly access the latest version is critical for a distributed company like ours,” Neary adds. “It’s now so much easier for our offices in Virginia, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and all over the country to collaborate in real time, without anything getting lost in transit.”

This has put JMA in a strong position to take their business to the next level. “The kinds of companies we work with want to know that their construction management firm is at the forefront of technology, and can finish projects on time and under budget,” explains Neary. “By setting us up on Egnyte, Network Coverage has enabled us to provide that assurance.”

Asked what advice he has for other companies in his field, Neary needed only a few words: “If you’re worried about data access or security, use a system like Egnyte to get your data off your basement servers and into the cloud. Your life will be much easier.”

As one of the largest independent registered investment advisors in the United States, The Colony Group manages enormous amounts and types of financial and other non-public personal information. “Our services encompass wealth management, investment management, tax compliance, business management, financial dispute resolution, and beyond,” explains Evan Cohen, Director, Information Technology.

Using Egnyte, Cohen’s team migrated a wealth of sensitive financial and personal information from 21 separate offices into one consolidated environment, streamlining collaboration and file access workflows and strengthening trust across its user base. All the while, Egnyte’s content management platform offered unparalleled ease of use, making user adoption a breeze for the whole team.

Challenge: Siloed Data Slows Collaboration—and Client Services

The Colony Group consists of numerous teams dispersed across the country, previously using various systems to house and manage files. This system disparity often came from mergers, who join with the firm with legacy systems in tow. “The result was content management workflows that spanned Office 365, Laserfiche, other document management systems, Word documents, file cabinets, and more,” explains Cohen. “Teams kept their data siloed on their own systems and their own work areas because it was necessary to avoid disruption to client service, but that causes problems when you have multiple teams trying to work together as one company.”

This disconnected environment produced challenges for Cohen and his IT team on multiple fronts:

• Locating and collaborating on files
  Finding and sharing content required rifling through an expansive roster of content management systems. If you were not familiar with the technology at issue, it was a needle-in-a-haystack process that caused unnecessary delays. If teams needed to collaborate on a topic or client need, the lack of common access to common resources was a deterrent that the firm needed to eliminate
• Content governance
  To satisfy clients — as well as regulators — firms like The Colony Group need to know where sensitive content is located, and who has access to it, at all times. “High-profile individuals like celebrities and athletes hire us to transact on their behalf, from paying bills to making discretionary investment decisions,” says Cohen. “These and all of our clients need to trust that we have everything under control.”

It soon became clear that more efficient collaboration and data governance would require unifying their content into one centralized environment. “Whether it’s client data or research we’ve conducted on investment funds,” Cohen says. “We wanted to get it from one place—not 40.”

Solution: One Source of Truth for All Sensitive Data

The team brought in Egnyte to serve as a centralized environment for storing, accessing, and sharing data. Ashley Ayala, IT Project Manager at The Colony Group, helped with the discovery, planning, and implementation.

“Training folks on Egnyte was incredibly easy because the system appears on team members’ devices as the same kind of folder structure they’re already accustomed to using,” Ayala explains. “It was disruption-free, which made user adoption so much smoother. I even had someone tell me ‘I don’t use Egnyte,’ not realizing she was using it every day.”

“The migration process was great as well,” adds Cohen. “It was really easy to import data from our legacy systems into our preferred folder structure in Egnyte.”

Once the team had completed the migration, Egnyte made it easier to find, collaborate on, and control access to content through features including:

• Sensitive content discovery and classification
  The team was able to classify information based on its level of sensitivity and search for files of various classifications—all within Egnyte. This helped with locating files, conducting reports, and maintaining visibility into where content is stored. Cohen offers an example: “When we make trades, securities are assigned unique identifiers called SEDOLs, which regulators require us to report on. Previously, paperwork containing SEDOLs could be stored in a dozen different systems. Now they’re all in Egnyte. We can do a quick sensitive content search for a particular SEDOL and export the results to our Compliance team in a nice package, which gives them a huge head start on recording, testing, and reporting on those numbers.”
• Viewing and controlling file access
  As geographically dispersed teams viewed and exchanged different files with different levels of sensitivity, the Compliance team needed assurance that file access is only available to the proper stakeholders. “With Egnyte, all it took was one quick audit to see what files have been shared, when, and by whom. And it was easy to grant and revoke file access as needed,” explains Cohen.
• Salesforce integration
  Egnyte’s smooth integration with Salesforce facilitated easy access to client-related files from both platforms. This yielded major dividends in client engagement. “Egnyte’s Salesforce integration is years ahead of the competition,” Cohen says. “When our Wealth Management team is servicing a client, they can pull up any and all material related to that client relationship, in real time, without leaving the Salesforce interface where they’re most comfortable. That leads to faster, more confident client services.”

Benefits: Easier Collaboration and a More Agile Business

Like many financial services firms, The Colony Group consists largely of industry veterans whose expertise lies less in technology than in areas specific to wealth management. As such, to ensure a smooth transition from the company’s legacy systems to Egnyte’s unified solution, it was essential that Egnyte offer an easy and intuitive workflow.

Here, Egnyte has exceeded expectations. “We’ve completed one merger since implementing Egnyte,” says Ayala. “The system was so easy to use that within just a few hours, the team from the merger firm was operating just as fluently as they previously were.”

Team members in any geography now have access to the same centralized content management system, where they can access files through a quick search and share them via secure links in just a few clicks. And Egnyte’s granular access permissions functionality provides confidence that files won’t fall into the wrong hands.

The impact on The Colony Group has been tremendous. “Egnyte has made it easy to consolidate, organize, protect, and collaborate on data so that we can make our company more agile, better trained, and able to level-up our services to our clients,” Cohen says. “We can now focus on new acquisitions and strengthening our tech stack with next-generation technology, including some new Egnyte features.”
 

The Colony Group’s implementation of Egnyte is still recent, and their momentum is strong. “The number of team members managing and collaborating on content through Egnyte, instead of email or legacy software, continues to grow,” says Cohen. “We’re full speed ahead.”

Optimal Risk Group provides security risk management consulting for some of the world’s most complex and high-profile customer engagements. For example, the London-based provider of tailored risk management services oversees the physical and digital security of clients ranging from banking datacenters, critical national infrastructure, and high-net-worth individuals.

Partnering with Egnyte has empowered Optimal Risk to fulfill their top obligation: providing clients with complete confidence that their sensitive data is protected by smart policies and cybersecurity measures.

Challenge: High-Stakes Security Demands Powerful Technology

When it comes to physical and digital security for Optimal Risk’s clients, the stakes couldn’t be higher. “The organisations we advise include critical national infrastructure that provide vital public services, like processing clean water and transporting natural gas,” explains Mike O’Neill, Group Managing Director at Optimal Risk Group. “What keeps the operators of these assets up at night is the idea of their information being insecurely passed between stakeholders, which could make that information vulnerable to attacks by adversaries ranging from lone threat actors to hostile foreign governments.”

“Some of the other assets we protect are private residences ranging up to $250 million in value,” adds Rick Mounfield, Director at Optimal Risk. “Working with these homeowners involves handling a great deal of personal information, including multiple addresses, businesses, and personal travel details. They rely on us to provide total assurance that this highly sensitive information is secure.”

But the tool the team was using for data security, Microsoft SharePoint, wasn’t providing these critical assurances – neither to Optimal Risk nor to their clients. “We have a dispersed global workforce, which involves a lot of data changing hands,” comments Mounfield. “Our growth has increased the complexity of our projects and with that comes risks through data sprawl. We needed a tool that could keep that data isolated and well-governed, and SharePoint wasn’t fulfilling that need.”

Solution: Strong, Demonstrable Data Protection Through Egnyte

During Optimal Risk’s trial period with Egnyte, Mounfield realized the platform was the powerful cybersecurity solution Optimal Risk was looking for. “It was an easy sell to get Egnyte implemented across the organisation, from our consultancy to our environmental crime enforcement business to our training business,” he says.

The team found it easy to migrate files into Egnyte from SharePoint and to build a unique folder structure that fit their data management workflows. From there, they leveraged a suite of features to keep data well-protected and governed and provide stronger confidence to Optimal Risk’s clients.

• Content Lifecycle policies
  The team used Egnyte to set policies for the automatic archival or deletion of sensitive files after specified intervals. As Stephen Haslett, Director of Cyber Investigation and Digital Forensics at Optimal Risk, puts it: “We’re able to confidently tell clients, for example, that certain files will be deleted after 30 days, after which only the client will possess that file. This conveys that the risk of anyone accessing the file through Optimal Risk is essentially nonexistent.”Egnyte also facilitated strong, detailed oversight throughout the content lifecycle. “Every time a folder or file is viewed, clicked, downloaded, or shared, we can see when it happened and who was involved,” Haslett says. With this level of visibility, Optimal Risk’s clients can confirm, easily and at any time, that data has never fallen into the wrong hands.
• Secure access to content
  Egnyte’s secure link sharing and granular access permissions management gave the team full control over who could access highly sensitive data. “We can invite specific individuals to specific folders where they can view, download, or upload files, and set policies to prevent others from accessing that folder,” explains O’Neill. Haslett adds: “We can also share individual files with clients through secure, controlled links that only they can access, and that expire after a certain interval.”
• ISO 27001 compliance
  With cyberattacks on the rise, firms like Optimal Risk are in jeopardy of losing clients if they don’t comply with ISO 27001, the global standard for information security management. The visibility Egnyte provided into how content was managed, accessed, modified, and exchanged enabled the Optimal Risk team to demonstrate their adherence to ISO 27001. Stuart Crighton, Senior Consultant at Optimal Risk, also recognized the ways Egnyte could be used internally to further strengthen the company’s compliance. “Within Egnyte, I can see exactly who has read a given document that’s necessary for ISO compliance,” Crighton says. “I can also see who hasn’t read it yet, so I can give them a nudge.”

Benefits: Stronger Security Drives New Business Growth

Partnering with Egnyte has empowered Optimal Risk to solidify their reputation as a leading security risk management consultancy protecting some of the world’s most high-value assets. “We’re all about authenticity,” says Mounfield. “Other companies make promises that their clients’ data is secure but can’t demonstrate it like we can with Egnyte. When a client asks us to confirm that their data has been removed from all external IT, I can use Egnyte’s governance features to show them exactly who worked on that data and when it was erased.”

The peace of mind Optimal Risk’s clients enjoy has yielded concrete business benefits. O’Neill offers a powerful example: “We recently met with some operators of category-5 critical national infrastructure sites – the highest security level – who were extremely nervous about their security being compromised and data ending up in the wrong hands. We showed them exactly how, with Egnyte, they could control access to folders, view and download data, and confirm that content was properly deleted at the end of a project. When they saw this, we could actually see them become more relaxed. Egnyte made them confident that we were the right company to work with. We won the contract soon after.”

That confidence doesn’t just extend to Optimal Risk’s clients – the internal team feels it as well. Charlie Swanson, Learning and Development Lead, explains the impact Egnyte has had in his department: “We store all our resources in Egnyte. This sounds risky from a security perspective, but Egnyte is such a strong system that we’re confident in storing all our content there. This allows learners to easily access their portfolios from a single, centralized location, with full confidence that it’s protected throughout its lifecycle.”

For the team at Optimal Risk, working with Egnyte is a simple matter of practicing what they preach. As a company whose mission is to strengthen security and manage their clients’ vulnerabilities across sectors, Optimal saw no other choice but to partner with a solution that could deliver what Egnyte offered. As Mounfield puts it: “I always tell our clients, as well as other security professionals, that if you’re worried about any kind of cyberattack, or vulnerability, or file backups, or migrating to the cloud, or ISO 27001 compliance, you need to speak to Egnyte right away.”

Engineering/Remediation Resources Group (ERRG), a minority- and woman-owned small business providing turnkey environmental remediation and munitions response services, was at a crossroads. The deadline for CMMC 2.0 compliance – a new federal regulation requiring companies working with the Department of Defense (DoD) to demonstrate cybersecurity controls supporting NIST 800-171 regulations – was rapidly approaching. “With about 80% of our revenue coming from federal government contracts, we had a choice,” says Brad Hall, Vice President at ERRG. “We either get compliant with CMMC or we cease to exist.”

Based on what they’d observed in other companies, achieving CMMC compliance was no walk in the park. “Software is a major compliance resource, and we saw companies make software vendor selection choices that really hamstrung them in the end,” says Hall. “After seeing the challenges and dysfunction they ran into, we didn’t want to suffer the same fate.”

Since partnering with Egnyte, ERRG has met roughly 90% of the requirements under CMMC 2.0 and is well on their way to achieving full compliance before the proposed deadline. They are being assisted by Network Coverage, a national Managed Services Provider and CMMC Registered Provider Organization helping ERRG achieve their compliance goals.

Challenge: Find a CMMC-Ready System Without Disrupting Workflows

ERRG had been using Microsoft SharePoint for its storage, monitoring, and file access controls. But the system was clunky and inefficient, and the team was starting to lose patience. “It was an old system that required a lot of overhead and IT support,” explains Hall. More importantly, the team worried that on-premises SharePoint environment, as a legacy system, wasn’t up to the task of facilitating compliance with the new regulations.

Their suspicions were confirmed when, in 2021, ERRG suffered a ransomware attack. “This was an eye-opening event for us,” says Hall. “It was exactly the kind of attack that the CMMC requirements aim to prevent. We knew we needed a new partner to prevent it from happening again.”

But a successful compliance journey would involve more than finding software that had the necessary security capabilities. It also meant minimizing disruption to a team who had never had to think much about cybersecurity before CMMC. “Our staff consists largely of engineers, geologists, and construction managers. In roles like these, cybersecurity is the last thing on your mind,” explains Hall. “They were accustomed to being able to access any file at any time, and CMMC would change that. So we needed to educate them a bit, and we needed a tool that would allow us to get fully compliant without being too disruptive to the team.”

Solution: Egnyte’s Unified Solution Accelerates the CMMC Journey

Within a month of the ransomware attack, ERRG made the decision to move file storage off its legacy SharePoint environment and into the cloud with Egnyte. They began migrating files into the new system and quickly discovered that the Egnyte platform could also become a key resource for addressing CUI security.

Two key aspects of Egnyte’s functionality were particularly impactful in empowering ERRG to reach the level of CUI security and controls necessary for CMMC compliance:

• Sensitive data discovery and classification
  Egnyte made it easy to zero in on particular files containing sensitive content that the team needed to address. Considering the volume of content ERRG works with, this would otherwise have been a needle-in-a-haystack project. “The security and governance tools in Egnyte were great. We’d never seen anything like it,” comments Hall. “The reports that we get from the system show us exactly which folders contain sensitive information like PII, so we know which ones are still out of compliance and need to be cleaned up.”
• Access and sharing controls
  The team was able to set granular file access permissions based on parameters such as username and role, ensuring that only the right people are able to view, modify, or delete any given file – all while still making it easy for people to locate and access the files they need to see. “This made it much easier to make our data more secure and controlled while still allowing people to get their jobs done,” says Hall. “Making these major changes in access controls that CMMC requires could have been really disruptive, but with Egnyte, we were able to make it as smooth as possible.”

Benefits: Racing Toward Compliance with the Wind at their Back

The switch to Egnyte has empowered ERRG to align their CUI security with the federal government’s requirements and race toward full CMMC Level 2 compliance. “Coming on board with Egnyte was a huge improvement,” says Hall. “The security level is far better than it ever was before. We never dreamed of being in the position we’re in now.”

Today, the firm has implemented 90% of the changes required for full Level 2 CMMC compliance and is on pace to complete physical security controls before the proposed deadline with time to spare. Along the way, they’ve had access not only to the functionality of Egnyte’s product, but to its team’s deep technical CMMC expertise, which has given them peace of mind that they’re handling the transition properly and nothing is falling through the cracks. This is further driven by the Network Coverage team’s expertise, not only as a premier Egnyte partner but in aiding in remediation and assessment efforts as ERRG prepares to complete the certification process.

ERRG has also benefited from aspects that extend beyond compliance. “We brought Egnyte on for CMMC, but the platform has also made things much easier and more efficient in areas like collaboration,” Hall explains.

During ERRG’s compliance journey, Hall reflected on the ways he expected CMMC 2.0 to impact the AEC space as a whole – and why, ultimately, he sees the regulation as a net positive. “A lot of companies are going to be a lot more secure in the new CMMC environment,” he says. “It will also put us in a position to assist some of our federal clients. CMMC affects all of us, and some agencies in the DoD itself are behind schedule on compliance. So while we’re getting compliant, we can serve as a consulting partner to help them do the same.”

For Wyanoke Group, a publisher of healthcare information based in New Jersey, adopting a fully cloud-based infrastructure was a long-held dream. After years spent using on-premises technology to house, share, and collaborate on internal and external content, they realized they needed a better system to provide the level of security that their clients demanded.

“We tried setting up a hybrid solution through Microsoft that combined on-premises file management with backups in the cloud,” explains Chuck Hosier, Vice President of Cybersecurity and IT Services at Wyanoke, who has been with the company for 25 years. “But Microsoft sunsetted that system, so we were back at square one.”

After partnering with Egnyte, Wyanoke finally made their cloud dream a reality – and achieved greater data security as a result.

Challenge: Local File Servers Cause Security and Cost Headaches

The Wyanoke team dealt with numerous headaches and inefficiencies related to their local file system. As just one example, Hosier explains: “We had to back up our content on tape, which took time and forced us to maintain huge tape libraries.”

Their biggest challenge, however, was the insufficiency of their on-premises system to deliver the level of security Wyanoke required. Specifically, the system gave the team very little control over who had access to the many files they shared internally and externally every day. “When we needed to share files, we had to use email attachments,” explains Hosier. “These files could include sensitive customer information that’s now sitting in the inboxes of email recipients. We had no way of stopping them from forwarding it to other people, and no insight into whether the content was sufficiently encrypted.”

These data security shortcomings made local file storage untenable for Wyanoke’s clients. “Many of our clients are in Pharma, where security and integrity of data are absolutely paramount. These clients demand that vendors have a secure way to store and transfer their data. To meet that demand, we needed a better cloud solution.”

Solution: Migrate to the Cloud and Gain More Control

Hosier had recently learned that some of Wyanoke’s clients were Egnyte users and decided to evaluate Egnyte’s cloud-hosted file server. He was immediately impressed. “Egnyte was what we had been seeking for years,” says Hosier. “It’s a full cloud-first solution with great uptime and security.”

John Leibrand, Senior Director, Privacy and Compliance at Wyanoke, was particularly impressed with how Egnyte met the standards associated with ISO 27001. “As an ISO-certified company, we’re obligated to ensure data is encrypted both at rest and in transit, that access controls are solid, and that we have strong reporting. Egnyte provides all of this. The security is top-notch, and it’s easy to report on anomalies. For example, if someone who usually accesses 50 files suddenly accesses 1,000, we’re immediately alerted.”

Egnyte particularly impressed the team with:

• Access controls for company files
  Egnyte empowered the team to share content using password-protected links, which would expire after a specified date, instead of file attachments. Users could also set granular roles and permission parameters to limit who could view, modify, or delete files – and could do so on their own, without having to impose upon IT. “Egnyte really helped us meet our clients’ security demands,” explains Brandon Veiga, Director, IT Support Services at Wyanoke. “It also gives power back to the user, enabling them to share files more easily and securely than they could with a local file server.”
• Native integration with Salesforce CRM
  Integrating Egnyte with Salesforce allowed Wyanoke’s sales team to share files securely without having to pivot away from their preferred workflows. “Our sales reps practically live in Salesforce,” says Veiga. “With this integration, our 50-odd Salesforce users can go through the whole end-to-end process of creating, uploading, and sharing files from the Egnyte source, without leaving the Salesforce interface they’re comfortable with. And it was so easy to set up the integration and user licenses.”
• Rapid deployment and data migration
  Egnyte’s ease of use and attentive support team made it easy to migrate Wyanoke’s large volumes of content from their on-premises system into Egnyte. “We were able to handle the technical aspect of this large-scale migration, as well as get 300-plus people on board, as smoothly as possible, thanks to the Egnyte team, the available training and documentation resources, and the ease of using the system,” says Hosier. “And the support was great. They really made us feel like we’re part of the Egnyte family.”

Benefits: Secure Sharing, Efficient Workflows, and Happy Clients

Armed with Egnyte’s cloud-first data governance and collaboration solution, the Wyanoke team has gained the cybersecurity and file access controls that they need to succeed. “Our clients, particularly in Pharma, often send us long questionnaires to evaluate the level of security we have in place,” explains Hosier. “We can now check all the boxes they’re looking for and confidently meet any security standard a client may bring.”

The switch to the cloud has empowered Wyanoke to streamline workflows and operate much more efficiently. The team is able to access files from anywhere without relying on a VPN – a major benefit for a geographically dispersed staff that often works from the road. And their IT team has become much more productive. “Being responsible for IT infrastructure at Wyanoke, up to 25% of my time was spent maintaining local file store infrastructure,” comments Hosier. “My team and I now get that valuable time back.”

“Employees are getting set up in the system about 30% faster,” adds Leibrand. “And we’ve probably seen a 60% drop in support tickets related to file backups and recoveries because Egnyte saves changes and backs up files automatically.”

Hosier sums up Egnyte as more than just a content repository: “From secure file sharing and getting ahead of ransomware attacks, to easy setup and efficient workflows, we get it all with Egnyte.”