Introduction

Third Rock Ventures is a venture capital firm and incubator for biotech startups focused on building sustainable, innovative companies that transform patients’ lives. Since 2007, it has helped launch 60 companies that are currently at various stages of maturity, from early discovery to broad commercial success. To date, these companies have brought 18 products to market – products that are now making an impact in the lives of patients and their families.

Over the past decade, Third Rock has evolved with the changing technology landscape, and Egnyte has been an integral part of its success, using the cloud to jumpstart growth for its emerging companies.

Challenge: Managing Data, Partners, and Regulations at Scale

Building a life sciences company has never been easy, but the growing volume and variety of data make it especially challenging. John Keilty, venture partner at Third Rock, explains: “You need to raise money, adhere to regulations, navigate R&D and clinical trials, hire the right people in an incredibly competitive market, and eventually commercialize your output.”

Early stage biotechs work closely with partner organizations like CROs to run experiments in the course of the drug discovery and development process. They also need to ensure they capture data from all relevant sources—internal and external—as part of their decision-making process. “This creates a variety of complications ranging from pulling together very heterogeneous data to dealing with the permissions and the security involved with having external folks providing data to a very IP-centric business,” Keilty said.

Third Rock needed a platform that could manage the quality and quantity of data being produced. It needed to support secure collaboration internally and externally. And, since its companies are subject to digital content regulations like 21 CFR Part 11 and financial disclosures and auditing rules for going public, it needed a platform that could stand up to regulatory and financial scrutiny as its companies mature.

“At their core, every biotech company that Third Rock starts is a data company,” Keilty said. “With that comes an obligation to protect that data appropriately.”

It’s a lot for any startup, let alone 60. And with Third Rock launching three per year on average, it needed a data management strategy that was repeatable and scalable, so its nascent companies were primed for growth.

Solution: Centralized Data Management for Accelerated Growth

Keilty works with the Third Rock platform team to develop, implement, and refine technology roadmaps across the firm’s portfolio. Over time, it has developed a cloud-based IT strategy that revolves around accelerating progress for companies as they incubate and launch. IT leaders at Third Rock call this “biotech in a box,” because companies are given a playbook that includes cloud infrastructure and a broad suite of SaaS applications.

“We think biotech in a box leads to the lowest common denominator to help our companies,” Keilty said. “Ultimately they'll go their own way, but we feel we've been able to accelerate their internal development with our approach.”

Over the past nine years, Egnyte has become a core piece of Third Rock’s SaaS strategy to address the broad and deep data storage and workflow needs of its biotech companies,

Benefits: Data Management That Grows With Life Sciences Firms

In today’s evolving industry landscape, technology is the underlying thread that connects all Third Rock’s challenges, Keilty said. That’s why Egnyte has been integral to its success.

“Biotechs need tools that can produce better outcomes, whether it involves audit trails for compliance, managing terabytes of data, or improving workflows when working with CROs. Egnyte makes all that possible," Keilty said.

One of the best parts of partnering with Egnyte has been how the two companies have evolved together. Looking back at its early days, Third Rock has moved on from other vendors that went in a different direction, but Egnyte has been there in tandem all along.

“What's been exciting about Egnyte is, they remain at the epicenter of a lot of our software as a service strategy,” Keilty said.

Egnyte has leaned into the life sciences space, creating specialized capabilities that dovetail with the needs of biotechs that face different demands at different stages of development. This includes existing capabilities around safe and fast data transfers and appropriate file access. It also includes newer advancements like Egnyte’s GxP capabilities, which help early-stage startups accelerate their trajectory into the clinical trial stage. The broader push into data protection also helps with data governance as required by the FDA, global healthcare agencies, and financial regulators (e.g., 21 CFR Part 11, SOX, and GDPR, to name a few).

“We can basically flip the switches with Egnyte as our biotech startups mature in their lifecycle to right-size the breadth of Egnyte offerings,” Keilty said.

Ultimately, the Egnyte platform delivers on its promises, serving as an important pillar for Third Rock’s IT strategy so its startups can focus less on the underlying technology and more on making a difference in patients’ lives.

“Building a life science company is a very complex process,” Chmielewski said. “What I love about Egnyte is that I can actually sleep at night knowing that my data is secure, that our scientists can work more effectively, and that we can launch a company in a day.”

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.

MullenLowe is a marketing and communications firm with offices around the world, including headquarters in London and Boston. Its creative teams work with some of the biggest brands in retail, life sciences and entertainment. The firm relies on Egnyte to support file sharing across its footprint of small international offices, its 1,200 person Boston HQ, and clients around the world.

Challenge

MullenLowe’s creative teams share, edit and produce large numbers of design files with a range of clients. To protect confidentiality and client IP, those documents must remain in the hands of only those who are authorized to work on them.

In a search for an enterprise-wide file solution, the IT team looked at a wide range of options, including Box and Dropbox. Box and Dropbox were deselected due to the lack of standard data protection and controls offered with those consumer-based solutions. They considered Google Drive, and while its security features were solid, they were too cumbersome for the small team to manage. According to Mark Lewis, Global Infrastructure & Security Director at MullenLowe: "As an IT organisation, we don't have visibility into what's stored on the Google Drives of our users, which makes it difficult to perform data audits. This, along with a lack of granular sharing controls, makes Google the wild west from a security point of view."

SharePoint, meanwhile, was too complex and required a team of .Net developers to manage and maintain. More importantly, it was deemed too easy to share public links to files and folders, which potentially would expose client’s data - a risk not worth taking.

Solution

MulllenLowe selected Egnyte to serve as its single source of content truth for the company’s designers. The rollout started in international offices and quickly spread to its Boston headquarters. In its London headquarters, MullenLowe moved 90 TB of data to Egnyte rather than purchase a new storage area network (SAN). For larger creative work, the firm uses Egnyte’s Smart Cache to overcome potential in-office latency issues.

For the central IT department, Egnyte expands their visibility into file usage with refined auditing on anomalous activity, permissions, and access across sites and users.

Since its rollout across the company, Egnyte has greatly improved the design team’s ability to access and share content, while providing IT with centralized control over external document sharing.

Benefits

Today, Egnyte serves as the single source of truth for most of the company’s users, enabling better auditing, automated reporting, and centralized visibility for IT. Users also leverage the enhanced co-editing features for desktop clients working in Microsoft 365, which helps to further improve team collaboration.

MullenLowe plans to use Egnyte's deep understanding of file usage across teams to further parse and analyze the data for reports on anomalous activity, permissions, and access across sites and users. That data will be used to analyze and understand file relationships, such as how many people in the Boston office have external file shares.

IT conducts biannual reviews of the platform to validate its suitability and security capabilities. They keep coming back to Egnyte because of its centralized control and how it supports auditing. Moreover, it saves his limited staff time and money, especially compared to alternatives that require a team of administrators to manage.

Founded in 1981, Blackmon-Farrell is a commercial electrical contractor based in Rochester, New York. While it handles a range of industrial, municipal, and commercial construction and installation needs throughout New York State, its core business exists in design-build and bid spec projects—90% of which are for state and local government. Its work is highlighted by projects at the Blue Cross Arena, the Monroe County Hall of Justice, and the Rochester Institute of Technology.

As a specialty contractor, labor efficiency is Blackmon-Farrell’s biggest concern. Time is of the essence, and productivity gains are often measured in minutes.

“If we lose a day on a project—10 people all standing around—that ends up costing us a lot of money,” said Mike Yatteau, VP of operations for Blackmon-Farrell.

The company continually focuses on employee efficiency as a measurement of success, and it recently tackled a major business hurdle by going digital with Egnyte.

Challenge: Replacing Paper-based Processes

Bidding on public sector contracts involves mountains of paperwork. Everything from wire and conduit to fixtures must be documented, reviewed, and submitted to meet project specifications. Employees also had to spend considerable time on document-intensive processes, such as certified payrolls.

Blackmon-Farrell managed all of this manually, creating workflow challenges and wasted manpower. To close out a project, a purchase order had to be completed and delivered prior to releasing the subcontractors. However, a single project could include over 100 open purchase orders, so someone had to track down the status of each one to confirm they were delivered.

Change orders were another tedious process that directly impacted the schedule. People had to go to the jobsite to get a measurement or comb through different versions of a drawing before they could put together an estimate.

While field teams were armed with mobile devices to access, view, and annotate Bluebeam files in real time, connectivity issues made the process extremely slow. Some teams carried personal hotspots as a fix, but they routinely exceeded their allotted data capacity in a matter of weeks, so their carrier throttled their bandwidth for the rest of the month. The cost was staggering—emailing large PDFs attachments had driven wireless data costs to at least $80 per month per user.

The resulting back and forth between digital and analog compounded the problem. Because of remote access issues, teams had to print four copies of the plan every time a project required a new set, which could cost as much as $2,000, not counting the cost of printers and ink deployed on jobsites. Other times, someone had to manually scan hundreds of sheets of sheets of paper to digitize large drawings. 

Solution: Digitize, Automate, and Manage

Blackmon-Farrell needed a better way. They had to organize project files, make them accessible from remote locations, and reduce costs.

Egnyte’s simple file structure made file management easy. Blackmon-Farrell used standardized project folder templates and assigned a job number to each folder, which made it easy to know what content aligned to which project.

The firm streamlined the change order process by establishing a dedicated “return folder” to collect any costs and supporting documentation from the field. Those orders are now quickly reviewed and approved by the office. And because Egnyte tracks versions and who accessed the document, there aren’t any questions about approval decisions.

As Egnyte is a cloud-based, centralized document solution, everyone can access project files no matter where they are. Supervisors in the field use their mobile devices to go directly to the designated folder in Egnyte rather than searching through old emails or paper files. Teams use links to files and folders instead of attaching large PDFs, so even in low bandwidth locations they can access information quickly for improved communication and collaboration.

The ability to exchange files directly with clients and teams in the field by uploading to dedicated folders reduced the need to print multiple sets of plans and scan hundreds of individual documents.

Benefits: Simplified Workflows and Reduced Costs

Blackmon-Farrell was able to save time and money with the Egnyte platform in several ways:

• Formerly complex workflows are now simplified and accelerated
• Change orders are submitted faster and more accurately
• Digital images and files are easily uploaded and available for approval
• Project closeout is streamlined through tagging, file retention policies, and removing document access for subcontractors who are no longer on the project
• Potential litigation costs are avoided by ensuring contracts and warranties are properly maintained

“In the past, we would have to keep a physical folder for each purchase order for each client. Considering the volume, it wasn’t manageable.” Yatteau said. “With Egnyte, I can keep everything organized and stay on top of what’s been reviewed and approved.”

Teams use Egnyte’s native integration with Bluebeam to view, mark up, and share plans directly from their mobile devices. Because they’re no longer reliant on paper records, the company has significantly reduced printing costs and eliminated the need to drive from jobsite to jobsite to deliver those plans.

And by emailing links to documents instead of attaching large files, Blackmon-Farrell has dramatically reduced its wireless consumption, saving $40 to $50 per user in monthly data bills.

Blackmon-Farrell is realizing the benefits of becoming a digital organization - lower costs, easier access to data, faster processes, and greater productivity – all of which result in an improved bottom line.

 KPS4Parents is a nonprofit child and family advocacy organization focused on the needs of students with disabilities in the early education, K-12, and post-secondary settings. Founded in 2003, the California-based organization helps parents and adult students throughout the United States navigate the highly regulated bureaucracy of public education and publicly funded educational programs. Its goal is to ensure each individual student receives the outcomes promised to them by law and funded by taxpayer dollars.

Challenge: Antiquated Document Management

At the core of special needs education is the Individualized Educational Program (IEP) — a very document intensive process that produces a legally binding controlling document, an IEP, for each special education student. A single case can generate over 1,000 records from 10 different stakeholders including parents, attorneys, educators, expert advisors, school districts, regulatory investigators, administrative hearing offices, and federal courts. “The documents save the day when it comes to IEPs. It’s a black and white, evidence-based journey,” said KPS4Parents CEO Anne Zachry.

Many parents become overwhelmed by the sea of documentation and the multitude of ways those documents are shared. They or their representatives must fax, email in batches over unsecured connections, make hard copies of paper records, mail CDs of audio recordings, and/or deliver evidence binders to hearing officers and investigators in person.

As of late, the administrative hearing offices and courts require digital uploads of evidence instead of paper copies or recordings on portable storage devices. KPS4Parents is better prepared to accommodate digital document sharing than most school districts and law firms, which are still heavily using paper.

Solution: Modernized, Secure File Sharing

KPS4Parents recognized the need for parents, outside experts, attorneys, and advocates to share confidential evidence in a highly secure and user-friendly environment. Egnyte was selected for its security model, scalability, and ease of use for both the sender and the recipient.

Using the platform, the typical case flow follows this pattern:

• New client folder created on Egnyte, with parental access to the child’s folder and sub-folders
• The local school district uploads files to a secure folder, but cannot access the rest of the child’s records
• KPS4Parents reviews the information and creates a report outlining the child’s IEP
• Records are shared as needed with expert assessors, attorneys, state and federal regulators, or other enforcement officials
• Folder and file permissions are easily revoked when users no longer need access to the data

Egnyte keeps important records submission-ready for digital sharing with stakeholders and decision-makers. Because education records are protected under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), and sometimes also the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the security that Egnyte provides to keep records secure is imperative. Everyone involved has peace of mind in knowing they are not risking disclosure of protected information.

Results: Streamlined Processes for Parents and Stakeholders

KPS4Parents has received glowing praise for its processes and use of the Egnyte platform to facilitate secure communication with all stakeholders involved in its cases.

Heather Dora, a licensed educational psychologist who has worked in the public school system and as a private practitioner, attested to the value of Egnyte for school districts. “Its user-friendly nature ultimately benefits the student, reduces litigation brought against the district, and increases efficiency so that psychologists and other professionals can focus on meaningful work.”

An attorney from the U.S. Department of Education has expressed his appreciation for how KPS4Parents uses Egnyte to share evidence in support of regulatory complaints. According to Goriune Dudukgian of the California Justice Project: “Management and sharing of confidential, legally protected documents is essential to our work,” he said. “Egnyte has greatly facilitated our work because it is HIPAA and FERPA compliant, very easy to use, and searchable… allowing us to find the needle in a haystack.”

Parents appreciate the 24/7 access to their children's records and the ability to add new records to their children's files the moment they become available, including uploading photos or PDFs of documents, voice mail messages, audio recordings of meetings, and other important records from their mobile devices with the Egnyte app. They can also retrieve and share records with doctors and specialists on the spot during appointments using the Egnyte app on their devices. The speed of communication and the efficiency with which KPS4Parents' cases can be processed make it possible to overcome the hurdles of complex, publicly funded programs for people with disabilities. “Egnyte has been immensely beneficial with the collaboration among my son’s entire team. Sending and storing files in an organized way while being able to isolate who can see what, is a great benefit,” said one KPS4Parents client.

Many KPS4Parents students and their families stay with the organization for years, from preschool to high school graduation and beyond. All documentation for each student is available to parents throughout their journey. The importance of that data is near and dear to Anne Zachry of KPS4Parents: “I’d go without food before I’d go without Egnyte. It’s the hub; everyone is depending on it.”

Looking ahead, KPS4Parents plans to develop an app for parents to track their children's special education programs. The intent is to help parents better advocate for themselves. Leveraging Egnyte for secure document storage, the app will include guides for regulatory timelines that integrate with calendar apps to help parents keep on top of assessments, IEP meetings, and other regulated procedures. It will also include case management tools to help parents identify the necessary steps to solve specific challenges. Automated workflow processes will build evidence lists and case maps as needed.

Introduction

Founded in 2015, Decibel is a clinical-stage biotechnology company dedicated to discovering and developing transformative treatments to restore and improve hearing and balance. For this growth-stage biotech, Egnyte has been a valuable partner in supporting clinical and regulatory operations, medical writing, biostatistics and data management teams with a single repository for all documentation gathered from CROs and submitted to the FDA and other regulatory agencies.

Challenge

As Decibel grew, eventually going public in 2021, they became even more reliant on a global network of contract research organizations (CROs) to conduct comprehensive clinical trials.

These organizations collect a variety of data to support Decibel’s clinical trials, such as visit times and dates, testing results, adverse event information, patient status, and more. The sheer volume of data collected forced Decibel to find a solution that could not only ensure the accurate intake of data from CROs, but apply rigorous governance over the data, consistent with Good Clinical Practices (GCP). In parallel, the solution needed to support the secure sharing of clinical trial data across external third parties.

Solution

Decibel deployed Egnyte as their single source of truth for all regulated documentation. For large data sets coming in from CROs, Decibel uses Egnyte’s secure upload links, which are partitioned off from the rest of the internal file sharing system. Folder permissions and link expiration dates are used for additional controls. When Decibel takes part in smaller academic collaborations, it leverages Egnyte with a file structure for housing documents in lieu of a full-blown TMF.

“We are putting all documentation submitted to FDA and other regulatory agencies in Egnyte, so that now and in the future, people know where to find the actual documentation that was given to the agencies for review,” Wolff said.

The Decibel team also benefits from Egnyte’s integrations with business apps, like Microsoft Teams. Any files shared within Teams are ultimately governed by Egnyte and as such, remain compliant. The integration between the two platforms has been a big time-saver for the group, as employees no longer must chase down team members looking for the latest document in Teams.

Egnyte’s data security and ease-of-use are some of the biggest benefits the company has gained. As Decibel continues to work with globally dispersed CROs, moving data out of third-party folders and into the main trial folder within Decibel is easy. Teams can now quickly locate documentation, and co-edit and share files, without the worry of working from old versions or mis-handling sensitive trial data.

Benefits

Decibel invested in the Egnyte platform early on to support secure, external file sharing. As the company has experienced rapid growth, so has their reliance on Egnyte for more advanced workflows, like managing clinical trial documentation—without needing a full-blown clinical system.

Decibel is also excited about what’s still to come, and how Egnyte is open to evolving with the life sciences industry. Wolff said she’s seen many improvements to the platform over the past year, and she appreciates the team’s willingness to respond to customer requests for improvements.

“In terms of the clinical trial and pharma space, I think Egnyte is doing a great job of fulfilling our needs,” Wolff said. “I'm excited to leverage more of the security features and more of the integrations with other applications as we move along.”

KAST Construction is a general contractor based in West Palm Beach, Florida. As an ENR Top 400 ranked contractor, KAST specializes in high-density residential, hospitality, and commercial projects. KAST has 300 employees located in offices and job sites in and around West Palm Beach, Miami, and Tampa, FL.

Challenge: VDC and Project Team Inefficiency

In 2015, KAST Construction management began to expand the company’s use of technology, particularly Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Virtual Design and Construction (VDC). Rob Sloyer was hired on as director of technical services, and his first priority was to implement the new technology effectively.

To do this successfully, Sloyer and his team needed to ensure that project teams could work collectively and securely in new and efficient ways.

“Our job is to manage Procore, our drones, and the VDC program, all of which includes training, policies, and procedures,” said Sloyer, now the VP of innovation and strategic services.

KAST saw VDC as a way to improve how they built. They believed it could positively impact the quality of their projects through better collaboration, lowered costs and enhanced safety. But as they rolled out the initiative, they found a series of data management inefficiencies that hindered any improvements in productivity.

For starters, the VDC team operated almost independently of the projects they supported. The team began every project by asking the project manager a series of questions—addressing the areas that needed to be coordinated, the expected outcome, the budget, and deadlines. Then they would go work amongst themselves to produce the designs.

That approach involved a lot of back and forth with a project manager who was extremely busy with project startup. If the VDC team scheduled time to work on a project but lacked all the necessary information, such as the current budget or schedule, they had to email the project manager to get it answered. Waiting for responses slowed everything down and resulted in the loss of scheduled days.

In addition, teams executing the projects—the ones who needed the designs, schedules, and budgets from the VDC team—couldn’t find the information. “If a project team is looking for model files, and they are hard to find, hard to access, and hard to use, they are just not going to do it,” Sloyer said.

As a result, the VDC team wasn’t providing the full support the project teams required, and the project teams were wasting time and money either searching for designs or building off old plans.

Solution: Standardized, Secure Access for All

Sloyer knew that for the VDC program at KAST to be successful, it required a shift in mindset and a better way to facilitate the exchange of information between the project teams and the VDC team.

Sloyer had always used Egnyte to store project drawings that were hyperlinked back to Bluebeam so he could access files from his desktop, laptop, or mobile device. And he recognized the opportunity to leverage that same use case at a larger scale.

“I realized this was something that could serve everyone, from the project teams to the subcontractors and trade contractors,” Sloyer said. “What if the information was easy to find when people needed it, no matter where or who they were?”

With that realization, Sloyer’s team stood up standardized Egnyte file structures for both Precon and Operations. And now when a project begins, the VDC managers know exactly where to find the information they need without having to ask anyone or wait for an email response. When they have to develop schedules and budgets for the VDC process, they just go to Egnyte, find the information, and start generating plans. And when the plans are ready, they post them back to Egnyte, making them immediately available to the Precon teams.

The same goes for Operations. They have their own project folder but can easily go back to the Precon folder to find the VDC information they need. And while they can’t edit or delete the files (ensuring data integrity), they can download and upload them to the Operations project folders for easy access when needed. Plus, the Precon and Operations folder structures are customized for each group to better address their unique needs.

The standardized folder structure makes it easy to find the right information on any project. As teams transition between projects, they know what information will be in each folder and how to get it, saving countless hours.

Project-based access controls make it even easier to find the right folder through all the noise. “When I go into Egnyte as an Administrator, I can see 300 projects with 800 folders each,” Sloyer said. “That’s a lot. But our project managers only see the projects they are working on. They don’t have to click around to find the right folder, so it’s really simple and saves a bunch of time.”

Egnyte also enables secure file sharing with subcontractors, which is critical because KAST doesn’t do any self-perform work. “With Egnyte, we can share with our subcontractors for the duration of the project and when the project is over, we can revoke their access. We can even lock the file after it has been downloaded. That gives us a lot of control and the confidence to know we can protect our clients’ sensitive information,” said Sloyer. 

Benefits: Building Smarter and Faster

Egnyte allows KAST to facilitate the flow of data to the people who need it, when they need it. When the VDC team has time scheduled to work on a project, there is no more searching for files, no more waiting for email responses, and no more wasting schedule days. And the benefits of Egnyte go beyond the VDC team.

Before, when KAST shared project administrators between job sites, the team needed to wait until the admin was physically on their site to get files or questions answered. Now, with Egnyte’s integration with Procore, the admins can access and share the files teams need no matter where they are.

“How we operated before resulted in a lot of waiting around. Now, the admins can respond to needs from a specific person no matter where they are. That saves time and improves job satisfaction,” said Sloyer.

The recent strengthening of the integration between Procore and Egnyte will make it easier to access the latest Procore files from any device. And the fact that co-editing is now available on any device will improve how they collaborate together.

“Now teams can work from home, from the coffee shop, from their kid’s Little League game,” Sloyer said. “The people, and firms, who can integrate work and life will eat the lunch of those who can’t, and Egnyte gives us that flexibility.”

What started as an individual use case to increase productivity, has now resulted in the entire VDC team providing better service to the organization.

KAST is building smarter and faster with a little help from Egnyte.

Challenges

Sargent is a 350-person-strong, employee-owned infrastructure construction company in Stillwater, Maine. It has projects in seven states, covering everything from wind farms to landfill cells.

When Sargent had a data breach in 2020, they were lucky that their IT service provider, Network Coverage (NetCov), was there to get them back up and running.

The close call forced Sargent to realize that a file management solution that could provide both data access and threat protection, in the office and in the field, would be the way to minimize the risk of future attacks.

However, their office employees were using Dropbox, a notoriously insecure file sharing platform, and were struggling to effectively store and share information. Additionally, field teams couldn’t access the up-to-date information they needed in a timely manner which was slowing projects down.

For example, a project manager in the office would submit paperwork to the owner for review and approval, while also emailing the same paperwork to the supervisor in the field. If the owner came back with a change, the project manager would need to email the supervisor again to let them know of the latest plan. Once the owner approved the final changes the project manager would need to email the supervisor again to let them know of the final decision so they could procure the right material and begin construction.

Not only was the process slow and tedious, but on jobsites with limited connectivity, the supervisor might only be receiving notifications once a day. Meaning they had to spend time searching through all their emails to try to find the latest plans and approvals - that is, if they hadn’t already started construction working off old versions of the plan. The result – project delays and unnecessary expenses due to procuring the wrong part or building off the wrong specs.

To overcome these issues and stay on schedule, many project managers purchased personal hard drives and downloaded files to them for access from anywhere. If those hard drives were lost or damaged, a common occurrence, they would lose data, causing even more rework. In addition, having unprotected, and unknown, hard drives with sensitive company and client data on jobsites posed a significant risk.

It was time for a solution that worked for everyone—employees in the office, teams in the field, and the IT department responsible for keeping all data secure.

Sargent turned to NetCov for a solution that could both improve productivity and protect their data.

“NetCov has always been a lifesaver, and they were there in our time of despair,” said Tasha Gardner, CFO at Sargent. “Through all our years of working together and all their technology recommendations, they have never led us astray. So, it only made sense for us to turn to them for help.”

NetCov recommended Egnyte.

Saving Time and Money With Egnyte

With Egnyte, Sargent’s personnel have secure access to the files they need, when they need them, regardless of whether they’re in the office or on remote jobsites. They can easily share files across internal teams, as well as external vendors, owners, and subcontractors.

Getting a plan approved quickly evolved from a convoluted series of emails to a simple file upload. Now, from a single Egnyte folder, the project manager, the owner, and the supervisor on site all have access to the latest version of the file. This means less time searching through email for files, less rework on projects, and less cost.

Sargent can also send large files more easily to potential subcontractors or vendors. Previously, when bidding on a project, estimators and project manager teams struggled to provide large plan sets to the potential client.

“We have plan copiers and printers that used to run 24 hours a day just for people to give us a price,” said Jason Light, IT manager at Sargent. “Now we just send them PDF files.”

The teams in the field love Egnyte because it means no more VPN, long delays waiting for a wireless connection to get the files they need, or time spent backing up and restoring files.

“We did a cost benefit analysis,” Gardner said. “The time savings resulting from the project management team and the supervisors not having to backup and restore their files...that in itself pays for the cost of Egnyte.”

And Sargent isn’t stopping there.

More Opportunities Ahead

Sargent is looking to expand its use of Egnyte to construction equipment. Today’s machinery is equipped with GPS, computers, and hotspots with internet connectivity. However, field engineers and surveyors manually upload data to each machine.

Currently, surveyors create a file (such as a GIS shapefile), put it on a thumb drive, travel to a site, plug it in, upload the data, then run the file and make sure it is going to work. Then they drive to the next jobsite and do the same thing. This process not only wastes time, but also leads to a high degree of job dissatisfaction.

“It's getting harder to keep good surveyors because they spend a lot of time traveling, going between jobsites and physically carrying files to the machines,” Light said.

“What if we used Egnyte to upload the files automatically to the equipment?” Light said. “The surveyor could stay in the office and just push the files directly to the machines. That is going to save them a bunch of time.”

For Sargent, what started as a project to better protect their data and improve access to files evolved into an initiative to optimize their workflows. With Egnyte, employees in the office and in the field can easily access files and collaborate from anywhere. And IT is confident in the security of project documentation and client data. The result is less risk and greater productivity across the entire organization.

“We now have happier people,” Gardner said. “And happier people are more productive people.”