Challenges: Going from Analog to Digital

In business for over 50 years, ESA environmental consulting has 21 offices across California, the Pacific Northwest, and the Southeastern United States. ESA clients range from government agencies to non-profit organizations to private industry. ESA scientists, planners, historians, archaeologists, engineers, designers, and technical specialists provide critical thinking, in-depth analyses, and committed follow-through to guide successful policy development and project planning and deliver enduring multi-objective solutions. ESA is 100% employee owned.

The trigger to work with Egnyte began with a casual conversation about “what if” something goes wrong. Headquartered in San Francisco, where there are a lot of earthquakes, ESA needed a way to retrieve content and stay on task. Business continuity needed to be thoroughly addressed.

Before cloud adoption, ESA’s field staff couldn’t quickly transfer data or files. Engineers gathered field data and then traveled back to the office to send information. There was no way to transmit this information digitally from the field. Teams wasted a significant amount of time. In addition, there was the challenge of having 100+ people working on Computer Aid Design (CAD) files. This environment raised a range of concerns related to the capture of data, delivery of information, provision of service to the end-user, security, and continuity. ESA needed a single source of truth to deliver uninterrupted, secure data to the end-user.

With information coming from locations throughout the United States, document control became a challenge. To make matters worse, ESA also utilized a data center that required a lot of maintenance. Large amounts of field data enter BIM-based environmental impact assessment models. The challenge is moving these large amounts of data from the field into the office where the modeling work happens and where teams, often operating from different sites, can collaborate on the data effectively.

Solution: One Source of Truth

As an organization, ESA looks at technology strategically by evaluating whether a tool can make a difference with client satisfaction. It is also important for ESA to partner with software providers.

“The exchange is a journey,” said Spencer Mains, Director of ESAtech, ESA. “Once you go into implementation, ongoing innovation is important. A strong belief and high empathy for the worker and what they endure every day is vital to the success of the digital workplace.”

For Mains, it was a no-brainer to roll out Egnyte as ESA’s single source of truth. Egnyte reduces work stress by providing one location for production and storage. When off-site personnel work on mobile devices and remote desktops, the information ends in the same production environment. Engineering firms can retain their content, comply with contractual obligations, and comply with warranties. With Egnyte, ESA can archive such content and quickly retrieve it when needed.

Egnyte does not stand in the way of business. Collaboration is swift and secure, which helps to ensure success. Mains provides an example: “A colleague contacted me letting me know he had a huge problem. He said, ‘I have to get an ERP done by the end of the week and I don’t know how I’m going to accomplish that.’” Mains offered up the solution. They set up shared space on Egnyte where all 15 people on the team, 5 of them from the client side, could co-edit in real-time the environmental impact review. What normally took weeks was down to a few days. For the ESA team, this event was a paradigm shift.

Security and governance was a deciding factor for partnering with Egnyte. ESA works with clients that require security assurances and service continuity. Today, ESA is able to assure team engagement and project information is secure and business will proceed uninterrupted.

With Egnyte for AEC, ESA’s clients can:

• Access field data and technical documents.
• Collaborate on the production of technical documents easily and efficiently.
• Be assured valuable and sensitive information is secure.
• Be assured services can proceed uninterrupted.

Results: A Heightened Focus on the Customer

ESA is a professional services consultancy with a focus on environmental science, engineering, and architecture. Driven by utilization rates, the less time they spend on administration work, the more time they can deliver for the client. “Eight minutes a day saved from doing administration may not sound like much”, says Mains, “but if you have 400 people, that is a lot of time. And when they use that time on for more intellectual tasks delivering greater value back to the customer, you start to see real results.”

For Mains, it was a no-brainer to roll out Egnyte as ESA’s source of truth. Egnyte reduces work stress by providing a single location for production and storage. Regardless of whether people are working offsite or on remote desktops, the information ends up in the same location. ESA can also obtain archived content within the storage environment within minutes.

Making the change to Egnyte was handled in a deliberate manner. The first step was to migrate content. During the journey, Mains contemplated introducing all the bells and whistles the platform offers. Instinctively, he knew that approach could overwhelm the organization and jeopardize progress. Mains stayed the course with a more pragmatic approach.

This cadence is proving out. Main explains that at some point ESA will reach the advanced user phase. He says, “A lot of people do not realize Egnyte’s capabilities, but it is important to introduce features incrementally.” Today, the ESA IT department’s role has evolved from providing Egnyte tech support to providing education. ESA is teaching people about the appropriate use of Egnyte and how to leverage the software in their daily work practices.

And that push to get employees to buy in is paying off. Mains said he was recently out for a walk when he heard a voice call his name. It was a coworker wanting to buy him a beer. “Hesitantly I agreed, thinking, ‘Where is this going?,’” he said, jokingly. The colleague proceeded to tell him about working from home and using Egnyte, singing the product’s praises. His colleague said it was ,“...fast, snappy, and completely delightful.” “Nine times out of ten, you get comments that things are not working well,” Mains said. “When you get that kind of feedback, you know you are doing the right thing.”

Challenges

On-premises servers requiring multiple systems—and 20 years of data—to manage

Operating since 1988, Riverside had accumulated a large and increasingly complex infrastructure of on-premises file servers and data storage hardware.

As the firm grew—in employee count as well as geographic footprint—the team implemented a range of cloud solutions to enable employees to manage some of their data in the cloud.

Solution

Bringing together data management and governance in an intuitive, unified platform

After researching the industry for data management solutions, Robert Sciaraffo, managing director of technology at Riverside, and his technology team turned to Egnyte’s enterprise platform.

The first selling point was Egnyte’s user-friendly interface, with a visual folder structure familiar to any Windows or Mac user. “The end-user experience was so intuitive that the transition was a nonevent,” Sciaraffo says.

Another reason Egnyte topped Riverside’s list was the platform’s extensive app-integration library. As Sciaraffo notes, the company had been looking for opportunities to connect multiple apps to improve the staff’s workflows, and Egnyte's DocuSign integration was a good example of how that can work.

“With the Egnyte-DocuSign integration, a user can send a signature request to anyone, and when they eSign the document, the signed copy automatically lands in the correct Egnyte folder,” he says.

Finally, Sciaraffo explains, even if there were lingering questions about whether the solution checked every box on their wish list, the Riverside team ultimately found a compelling reason to go with Egnyte regardless. “From a partnership perspective, Egnyte was phenomenal to work with from the very beginning,” he says.

“The pre-sales experience was outstanding. The Professional Services team couldn’t have been more helpful and patient. And even now—after we’ve been a customer for more than a year—our Egnyte Project Management team still calls us regularly to find out if we have any new needs or requests.”

Results

Unlocking workflow efficiencies

As it turned out, though, the Egnyte platform did check all the key functionality boxes on Riverside’s wish list. And today, with the solution deployed across the firm, both Riverside’s business users and the technology team are enjoying many operational improvements, such as:

Faster workflows

With all their files centralized and accessible on the Egnyte cloud platform, Riverside’s staff can easily and safely share content externally. If the files are eligible for sharing outside the firm—which the technology team can also manage through Egnyte—employees can share them directly through their Egnyte environment.

Efficiencies through integrations

With the Egnyte DocuSign integration, Riverside’s employees who need signatures on a regular basis can send them through DocuSign. When the recipient hits the “Finish” button, the signed file automatically lands in the pre-designated Egnyte folder where it belongs.

Reduced costs

With the firm’s file management and sharing needs all handled through the centralized Egnyte environment, Riverside no longer needs additional cloud apps to house its data, or third-party software like the file-locking and encryption tools it used to manage its on-premises file server infrastructure. Egnyte is helping Riverside reduce its software costs as well as the time IT spends managing disparate solutions.

Improved data governance

With Egnyte’s Secure & Govern functionality, Riverside’s IT team has greater ability to protect and control the firm’s data.

Enhanced cybersecurity

Because it signed up for Egnyte’s enterprise platform, Riverside now also has access to a host of machine-learning capabilities for data security, including insider threat detection and zero-day ransomware protection.

Challenges

With a massively distributed team, spread across 21 offices, Alta Planning + Design needed the capability to build the best team for every project, without being limited by geographic boundaries. It wasn’t unusual for individuals across the US, Canada, and Asia with specific skill sets to collaborate on projects.

But, to be productive, remote teams needed to collaborate on the same files and data, such as project plans, large CAD files, and drone imagery, at the same time. And their existing infrastructure was impeding, rather than supporting, cross-site working.

The files people needed were siloed and scattered across a conglomeration of different servers and legacy Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices, all with different permission and access capabilities. This meant that even finding and accessing the files they needed was a manual chore, taking up critical time when they could have been working.

When users created or revised a file, problems mounted. With no central control or governance of content, users could unknowingly work on an outdated or duplicate file, or overwrite a colleagues’ work if two people were in a file simultaneously. This meant additional wasted hours, less productivity, and more frustration for everyone.

If someone accidentally deleted a file, there was no easy way to recover it, without waiting helplessly for individual vendors who developed the file in the first place to fix the issue.

Sharing files was yet another headache. Often, Alta’s project team needed to move the latest plans and 3D models from one server to another, but slow transfers wasted valuable project time. And when the user receiving the file had low bandwidth, the wait was even longer. Sometimes, files would be corrupted and they would have to start over.

Alta’s small IT team was also feeling the pain. With systems so disconnected, they had no central oversight on who was accessing what data, making the job of data protection, compliance and threat prevention virtually impossible.

Plus, they were spending so much time assisting with issues like data access and storage, that they had less hours in the day to ensure valuable intellectual property wasn’t getting into the wrong hands.

Alta urgently needed a consolidated platform that would improve visibility, collaboration, and content control across every project. A solution that would boost the speed and quality of projects—and create even more customer satisfaction.

Solutions

Deploying Egnyte, where every file can be identified and controlled, so users can securely access any content, anywhere, on any device.

Alta evaluated 11 potential solutions and quickly shortlisted three. They loved Egnyte, but had one issue; the platform didn’t have a ‘sync timer’ to show how long data migrations would take. As soon as they raised it, Egnyte responded, and engineered the exact tool they needed in days!

This extra layer of attention and customer care left a lasting impression and Alta knew Egnyte was the partner for them.

Thanks to Egnyte’s hands-on training and support, Alta migrated all 21 offices and 225 people from their cumbersome file infrastructure into Egnyte, creating a single source of truth in just two months.

Alta was already using tools such as GIS, AutoCad and Adobe Creative Suite and Egnyte seamlessly integrated with those existing investments. This safeguarded the flow of content across every app Alta uses.

Alta also quickly migrated every previously disconnected file into Egnyte’s platform, including from their legacy NAS devices, meaning all their content now lived in one place—Egnyte.

Suddenly, the security and control of content became simple and seamless for Alta’s IT team. With all valuable intellectual property now centralized in a single location they could keep content secure and correct permission and access issues in just a few clicks.

Meanwhile, employees could finally collaborate without friction, finding any resource they needed in seconds. And because Egnyte automatically syncs updated files in the background, users were always accessing the latest information—a critical requirement for effective collaboration and productive projects.

With Egnyte, users could also collaborate on projects globally with ease. Regardless of their geographic location, or the device or infrastructure they were using, team members could work on the same documents.

The platform also eliminated the problem of duplicating or overwriting work and made the frustration of deleted files a thing of the past, with the platform empowering users to retrieve lost information for themselves.

All the friction between collaborators that had been caused by poor connectivity and lack of access was gone—making key workflows instantly more streamlined and efficient.

Results

$220k+ saved every year and projects delivered 10% more efficiently.

Because Egynte reduces data access times so dramatically company-wide, the average billable user saves at least 30 minutes a day because they are no longer hunting for files. This saves the business approximately $91k a year.

The efficiencies they gain in collaborating and co-editing saves an additional 15 minutes a day per user, adding another $45k in savings.

Those 45 minutes a day of combined time savings enable Alta’s teams to work more quickly and effectively, and deliver projects 10% more efficiently.

Alta also significantly reduces its technical support costs thanks to Egnyte. For example, by consolidating all their storage into the platform, they reduce the IT management costs associated with multiple data silos by $81.5k a year. The business also eliminates support costs for Network Attached Storage devices (NASs) throughout Alta, saving a further $3.2k per year.

Meanwhile, the IT team has cut the time it spends on manual chores like managing and fixing issues, or assisting access, by 40%. With all data now stored within Egnyte, the IT team has reduced the number of backup methods and protocols from six to three. All of this equates to considerable time and resources back in their schedule to focus on more innovative projects, while Egnyte takes care of improving data visibility and control, while mitigating data risks for them.

Challenge

Kinetix was increasingly focused on high-growth biotechs in the life sciences marketplace, who needed a compliant, unified way to manage, secure, and validate all their data and automate the heavy workload of meeting regulatory compliance. However, Kinetix found many of the solutions provided by the market’s big players to be lacking in terms of security, governance, support, and the functionality required to meet clients’ large-scale data management needs.

Solution

Egnyte for Life Sciences changed everything in a very positive way. The unified data management platform enabled visibility and control of all clients’ data and documents, while a host of smart automation streamlined the job of maintaining compliance. Internal employees and external partners could collaborate on large file sets securely and quickly, threats were constantly monitored, valuable information was protected, and regulated documents were created and deployed to mitigate risk.

Results

Egnyte enabled Kinetix to solve its clients’ data governance issues for good, in turn increasing yearly revenue by $300k. After implementing Egnyte, clients have close to 0% disruption across their file share infrastructure, making it an efficient and profitable product for Kinetix to manage. Clients love Egnyte, too, because it helps them remain compliant, cuts costs, increases productivity, and helps them stay focused on delivering life-changing drug therapies and devices. Egnyte’s tailored, five-star customer care provides the cherry on the cake in a fantastic partnership.

Overview

In a competitive real estate development space, Lewis Group needed to maximize the productivity of its teams. Yet its existing file management infrastructure was slowing everyone down: it didn’t offer remote access to the files teams needed and when they were in the office, locating, moving, and syncing files was seriously sluggish.

Everything changed when Egnyte came onboard. With every file now easily accessed from a single platform and secure remote access made simple, productivity skyrocketed, projects accelerated, and direct costs fell by 66%.

Challenges

Lewis Group’s employees needed fast access to critical files, such as architectural plans and project documentation. Unfortunately, their existing file management system provided no remote access, so unless they were in the office, they couldn’t access, share, or collaborate on essential content. Even when they were at their desks, locating files on the network, moving large files around, and syncing were all agonisingly slow.

Solution

With Egnyte onboard, remote and office-based users can easily access and collaborate on files of any size, on any device, even when they’re offline, which improves productivity and relationships with clients and vendors. Egnyte’s central hub of visibility and control also eliminates the frustrations of backend file administration for IT.

Results

Switching to Egnyte has cut Lewis Group’s direct costs by 66%. And with 600 staff saving at least 30 minutes a day with Egnyte, Lewis Group has unlocked an incredible 300hrs of extra capacity across the business daily!