The Middle East division of China State Construction and Engineering Corp (CSCEC ME) manages multiple offices and construction projects across Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Qatar. As the company grew, its reliance on local file servers and paper documents for content collaboration became untenable.

Using Egnyte to digitize files and cloud-enable collaboration, the company unified its various offices and technology partners, developed an eagle eye against ransomware, and gained total control over its ecosystem.

Solution: Cloud-Enable Collaboration Through Egnyte

The team decided to migrate their data from local servers and paper into Egnyte’s cloud-hosted content environment. Egnyte immediately provided greater control over how – and how quickly – content was managed, accessed, and shared. “We simply create Egnyte folders to store our files and provide individuals and teams with access to those folders as needed,” Zhao says. “That gives the company full control over the data – people can access files from anywhere if we’ve provided the necessary permissions. And once a file is in Egnyte, we can share it with stakeholders instantly via secure links instead of email attachments, or worse, driving around with paper files.

Leo Honorio, IT Engineer at CSCEC ME, elaborates on the security issue. “Egnyte is great at detecting potential risks to our data and alerting us before it becomes a problem. We had a ransomware incident shortly after switching to Egnyte, but the system alerted us to it so quickly that we were able to take swift action and neutralize it immediately.”

As a construction and engineering firm, CSCEC ME relies heavily on technology partners such as Autodesk. Egnyte’s integration with Autodesk did wonders for facilitating these workflows. “We can access AutoCAD files directly from Egnyte, without having to switch between systems or download or upload anything,” Honorio explains. “It’s so empowering to have all our vendors at an arm’s reach, all from a centralized place.”

Benefits: Unified Control of Content and Security Environment

Since implementing Egnyte, CSCEC ME has asserted an unprecedented level of control over their content and workflows. This includes greater governance of how files are shared and accessed, more visibility into their security environment, and the ability to access files in third-party platforms directly – without jumping through hoops.

With more control, the team can work faster, which has yielded concrete improvements in areas like project setup. “Between gathering all the hardware and software, it often used to take us three or four months to set up a new project,” Zhao says. “With Egnyte, we can get up and running in just one day.”

Zhao concludes with a note on the timing of the switch to Egnyte. “We were already in the process of migrating our data into Egnyte’s cloud environment when Covid struck. Can you imagine if we hadn’t even started yet? The shift to fully remote work would have really broken things. But because of Egnyte, we were able to take the transition in stride.”