Headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, GBBN Architects is an architectural design firm focused on innovation in housing, healthcare, education, and cultural venue design. With over 150 employees across five offices in Ohio, Kentucky, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and China, they strive to deliver designs that not only result in great buildings but positively impact people. With a geographically dispersed workforce, many working remotely, the need for a secure and easy-to-use file collaboration platform came into focus.

Challenge: GBBN Reaches an On-Premises Crossroads

In 2021, GBBN Architects found themselves at a crossroads. The company had on-premises N5 storage device running their virtual environment which was soon running out of support. In addition, GBBN’s Panzura appliances were also running out of support. Between the expiration of hardware and software licenses, GBBN saw an opportunity to research new technologies and providers.

At the same time, GBBN was also focused on managing company data more effectively. For example, the IT team would receive support tickets that read, “My project is gone from the network.” In helping resolve the support tickets, GBBN’s IT staff couldn’t pull data usage reports from individual staff members to diagnose the issue. Matt Birk, GBBN’s CIO, says, “Using traditional tools such as Windows search, responding to this type of support ticket could take up to two days of searching through terabytes of data to find where a project was moved.”

Another challenge to effectively manage company data was secure file collaboration. Previously, GBBN was forced to give project partners access to their network, providing a domain log-in and access to a VPN connection. Birk says, “It was challenging for our IT staff to manage connectivity. Partner users had way more access to our company data than just the project files they needed; we hoped they wouldn’t inadvertently launch a ransomware attack.” There was the additional burden of tracking whether a partner user was still employed with the firm or not, ultimately relying on the individual partners to notify the GBBN IT staff of any personnel changes. And providing VPN access to partners of smaller firms that had outsourced their IT staff was even scarier. Birk says, “Each time a new partner was added to the network, our IT team would lose more control over the users accessing our company data.”

Carefully considering the existing data challenges and knowing the opportunity, the company began researching its options, starting with Panzura, Nasuni, AWS, and Microsoft Azure. GBBN focused on their primary data requirements, specifically global file locking, stability, and security. While all solutions met all or most the basic criteria, Egnyte went beyond. Birk says, “Once we met with Egnyte, we discovered the product included many more features than the other candidates in terms of security and governance. That caught the attention of our team, especially our network administrator.”

Solution: Richer Data Usage Reporting and Collaboration Capabilities

Egnyte reporting features captured everybody’s attention. Specifically, individual staff usage data coupled with the machine learning applied to each employee’s use of data jumped out to the company. Birk says, “Egnyte has unique features we did not see with the other platforms, or at least we did not see in depth on the other platforms.”

When considering whether to renew their Project Information Management application’s license, they found overlap between features provided by Egnyte and those provided by the PIM solutions, including sending large files, download tracking, file transfer link clicks, and outside party file requests. Given the extensive range of security and governance features and Egnyte’s ability to cover critical areas served by PIM applications, GBBN decided to change to Egnyte.

Once Egnyte was deployed, GBBN found immediate value in data usage reporting. The IT team could search for file changes and get results within five seconds, not the days they were used to waiting. The team also gained additional security features built on machine learning. Birk explains, “If a user is typically opening 50 files a day, but one day they open 100 files, we get an alert. Egnyte’s features have saved us from confidential data walking out the door.” Birk continues, “Prior to Egnyte, we had no ability to audit files that were downloaded, leaving our firm to trust that no confidential or source files were taken from our network. After Egnyte was implemented, we were able to audit and report on what individuals were downloading. This new capability enabled us to reverse the trend of an abnormal download of proprietary company data. Our management team was impressed with Egnyte’s data auditing tools, and IT has really earned their keep in protecting our company’s data!”

Egnyte is also making it easier for GBBN to collaborate with other architects. According to Mike Rensing, Director of Technology, “There is no longer the need to request files or handle requests from partner firms to send files. We add partners as another team member to our data source, giving them access to the project structure.” Once partners are added to a project folder, users have full access to working project documents, making collaboration smoother. But with Egnyte, GBBN can hide and protect confidential files and folders, meaning their partners can’t access them, keeping their data secure.

Benefits: Secure Data Availability Creates a Greater Work-Life Balance

“I don’t think I’ve implemented anything in my recollection that has had as many staff come to us saying how they love the access,” says Birk. He explains one of their goals was to get rid of VPN; GBBN is now 99.9% VPN free. Another goal was to provide project managers out meeting with clients the ability to access the files they needed from iPads or iOS devices. Birk says, “Project Managers like using iPads. Egnyte is agnostic, which allows them to present projects to client leaders from any device they want. They are ecstatic about data availability, which frees them from bulky laptops, power supplies, and a VPN. They love traveling light and being able to communicate our brand more effectively.”

The availability of the data has vastly improved project site visits. Rensing says, “Our teams can go to the site, pull out their phone, snap a picture, and directly place that image file in the project folder.” He explains, “Simply filing the image where it needs to go right from the project site saves time. Teams no longer download the photos and move image files to the folder at the office. It happens right at the job site.”

“Egnyte is improving work-life balance and mobility of our staff,” Birk says. “When we bring in a new hire, they are blown away by our access and the feature set.” Rensing recalls one staff member who expressed joy in accessing files from the car. He says, “This person was delighted to be able to access work files while traveling as a passenger. Something is being done right if you get thanks for that.”

Looking at what’s next with Egnyte, GBBN Architects will be tackling the management of old project files and stale data. Birk says, “We used to search for old folders on our projects drive to determine which ones were not being accessed in the past year. We are looking at Egnyte to automatically identify project files that have not been touched for a given amount of time and move them off active storage to archival storage. That will save space and money.”

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.