Established in 1949, Barnhill Contracting Company offers commercial building, site infrastructure, transportation, and asphalt services throughout the southeastern United States and is consistently ranked among ENR's Top Contractors in the country. Headquartered in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, the company has several statewide offices and over 900 employees.

With an average of 90 active projects on Procore, Barnhill Contracting Company was very excited to integrate Egnyte and Procore so its office and project teams had a single source of truth for their documents.

Challenge: Finding a Better Way to Securely Collaborate

Seven years ago, Barnhill Contracting Company undertook a strategic project to bring control and consistency to their file systems. The inception of this initiative began with Jason Deans, director of virtual construction. "Back then, all our file storage was on a shared drive internally and on premises,” Deans said. “You couldn't find anything. Documents were scattered in different locations. It took an hour for executive leadership to locate the right folder.”

In addition, project teams had an aversion to File Transfer Protocol (FTP). Instead, they preferred to transfer data through traditional means by burning it onto a CD and delivering the information to the intended parties. Deans needed a better way for teams to collaborate on large files internally and with outside parties such as architects and subcontractors. He also needed a way for collaborators to securely access files via mobile devices without requiring the use of email applications.

“I played around with Box, Dropbox, and a few other services looking for viable solutions. Then, working with Arthur Reed, our network administrator, we determined that Egnyte had the best feature set,” Deans said.

Barnhill initially rolled out Egnyte within its VDC (Virtual Design and Construction) department. But within a few months, executives wanted their own Egnyte accounts. Before long, the entire building division migrated their files onto Egnyte. "Once we migrated the building division files, over half of our company used Egnyte,” Reed said.

At that time, the company used a project management tool that didn’t integrate with Egnyte and wasn’t meeting all its needs, including support for project financials. Barnhill replaced that project management tool with Procore, but project-specific data still resided in two different locations that did not sync between Egnyte and Procore. It was confusing because so many documents doubled up, said Newall Rand, operations technology manager.

“Someone would save a file in Procore, and another person on the same project would save the same document to Egnyte,” Rand said. “A project team member could not find the right information because they did not know what the other team members were doing.”

According to Rand, Barnhill used another project management tool for punch lists, drawings, and submittals. “Basically, we still had two separate systems that were not talking to each other well,” he said.

Solution: Procore and Egnyte Keep Everyone in Sync

The Procore-Egnyte integration became a topic of discussion during the company's folder structure reorganization. Keeping in line with the initiative to rely on a single source of truth, project files needed to be accessible to stakeholders who did not have access to Procore. That meant they needed a solution to sync Procore files with files stored outside of Procore.

"We were trying to get everything down to where there's one source of truth for a project,” Reed said. “From Day One all the way through closeout, whether they have access to Procore or not, everyone needs to be working from the same latest version of files. The Egnyte and Procore integration makes that happen."

Once the enhanced Procore connector went live, Egnyte documents synced in real-time, allowing Barnhill's project teams to work in the Procore environment and access the documents from a single source of truth in Egnyte. That meant users could leverage a common folder structure without jumping between Procore and Egnyte.

"When an executive in the office needs to find a project document, they can go to the designated drive in Windows Explorer to find the same information as a project manager working in the Procore Environment," Deans said. "If an architect does not want to have access to the Procore project files, we can easily collaborate and share on those same files in Egnyte."

Results: Eliminate Duplication with the Easy-to-Use Connector

Barnhill's IT department trusts Egnyte’s enhanced Procore connector to sync files in both places. They are confident the data will be available to users whether they are accessing it through Egnyte or the Procore environment.

“When team members sign into their desktop app, they have access to their data right there,” Reed said. “They don’t have to spend time downloading, editing, and re-uploading. We have a very small IT team and don’t have a lot of time to train, and our building division folks don’t have much time to sit down and listen. With Egnyte, they just sign into their app and start working. It's intuitive."

A Win-Win Situation with Zero Complaints

Before creating a single source of truth for project file collaboration and storage, employees got frustrated. The VDC department could not collaborate on large files internally or externally. Employees could not find what they needed, and, at times, executive leadership would spend an hour looking for a project folder. In some cases, IT staff were pulled in just to find files.

On-premises versioning was cumbersome and not user intuitive. With Egnyte, they can restore the previous version in a few clicks, which Reed said makes him feel more secure.

Today, the IT team spends less time dealing with on-premises challenges. Auditing was a disaster before Egnyte. Finding out which user dragged a folder or where the user dragged the information was complicated and time-consuming. With Egnyte, Barnhill's IT crew pulls up a quick audit report to diagnose the issue. “The audit report will tell you who's accessing what, and how often,” said Reed. “With Egnyte's security features, we can be more proactive than reactive."

As Barnhill continues its journey toward creating a single source of truth, they are looking to migrate away from on-premises file storage. Reed says, “Egnyte's been super easy to use to the point where we just sign our guys in. They have a shared drive, so it's very simple for them to access what they need when they need it."

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.