No More Workarounds: How ESi Unified 500TB of Project Data and Built Enterprise AI on Top

Where AEC Meets Litigation

Engineering Systems Inc (ESi) is not a typical AEC firm. It operates at the intersection of three industries: 

• AEC, where its civil, structural, and architectural work mirrors traditional engineering practice
• Legal, where its engineers serve as expert witnesses for defense attorneys, insurance carriers, and in-house counsel 
• Media, where a visualizations team of more than 25 people  produces photorealistic 3D demonstratives and trial exhibits that shape how juries understand complex cases

That intersection changes everything about how ESi’s data must be managed. Every CT scan, drone flight, laser scan, and photographic archive is legally consequential evidence. It must be governed, traceable, and defensible. Sync delays, access inconsistencies, and shadow files aren’t inconveniences—they’re liabilities.

With more than 100,000 past projects, 20,000 active projects, and roughly 500TB of data under management, ESi needed a platform that could match its scale to replace the fragmented stack it had used for years. 

Seven Years Chasing a Single Source of Truth

When Matt Jeske, Senior Director of IT, joined ESi seven years ago, his mandate was simple: Get the firm to one governed file environment. What followed was a journey through on-premise servers, SharePoint, and eventually a hybrid model built on Nasuni—each step forward revealing new limitations.

Nasuni’s sync behavior was unpredictable. Heavily collaborative project teams across sites could look at different versions of the same file with no reliable sense of when data would resolve. But the deeper problem was structural. Nasuni’s Kerberos and SMB permissioning model ran through Active Directory, which imposes a hard ceiling of approximately 1,100 group memberships per user. 

For a firm where every project has a unique set of participants—and engineers work across dozens of projects simultaneously—that ceiling was a genuine operational constraint. Adding a user to a new project required a machine reboot or sign-out to refresh permissions. Removing friction from access management wasn’t optional—it was foundational.

Nasuni also never fully replaced SharePoint. Certain workflows, such as real-time document collaboration and reliable off-line, on-the-go access still required it, meaning ESi was running two systems in parallel—the opposite of a single source of truth. That was the deciding factor.

A Compliance Environment That Tolerates No Shortcuts

ESi works directly with U.S. Department of Justice attorneys, DoD prime contractors, and projects governed by protective orders, ITAR, CMMC, PII, and PHI requirements. Permissioning isn’t a preference—it’s a contractual and legal obligation.

Five years ago, ESi built NGM—an internal progressive web application that manages project creation, participant assignment, and access control at scale. Any platform ESi adopted had to integrate with NGM via API, enabling real-time permissioning without IT bottlenecks. That requirement ruled out most of the market.

The Egnyte Transformation

Egnyte delivered what every prior platform had promised and failed to provide: a single, governed, high-performance environment that worked natively across every application, operating system, and device the firm uses.

Performance

The impact was immediate. ESi’s four CT scanners can now write directly into project files via Egnyte's desktop app and web portal with incredible speed and reliability, a workflow that wasn’t possible before. For the firm’s visualizations group, which runs render farms to produce trial demonstratives, high-throughput data access unlocked entirely new workflows.

Permissioning Without Limits

Egnyte supports more than 100,000 group memberships, eliminating the Active Directory ceiling entirely. Through the NGM integration, permissions are now managed programmatically in real time—no reboots, no IT tickets, no lag. When an engineer is added to a project, access is instant. When a project closes, it’s revoked automatically.

Cross-Platform and Mobile

Roughly 20 percent of ESi’s workforce uses Mac OS. Under Nasuni, that group had a consistently inferior experience. Egnyte delivered parity across Mac and Windows—and extended it to ESi’s 200-device iPad fleet, enabling field investigators to access, upload, and collaborate on project data in real time from any location.

Single Source of Truth—Finally

For the first time in seven years, ESi operates from one governed file environment. No parallel SharePoint. No secondary network drives. One platform for every application, discipline, office, and device.

From File Platform to AI Foundation

A governed data environment wasn’t just an operational milestone for ESi—it was a prerequisite for the firm's AI program. With a 75-person task force, a formal steering committee, and written AI policy in place before any broad deployment, ESi has been building toward enterprise AI with unusual rigor for over two years. Two-thirds of the firm are licensed in Microsoft Copilot, with enterprise ChatGPT, Claude, and Egnyte AI both in active use. 

The firm's most consequential investment is the productization of its institutional knowledge—a three-person library team has cataloged more than 5,000 redacted expert reports alongside decades of technical standards, all loaded into Egnyte as queryable knowledge bases that help engineers write faster, better-grounded expert reports. And every AI agent operates within the same project-level permissioning that governs the rest of ESi's data. Governance isn’t an afterthought. It’s the architecture.

The Bottom Line

ESi came to Egnyte with seven years of accumulated frustration: sync unpredictability, a permissioning ceiling, platform fragmentation, and an inconsistent cross-platform experience. Egnyte resolved it all—and provided a foundation capable of supporting the AI program the firm has been building toward for years.

In forensic engineering, data isn’t just an asset. It’s evidence. The platform that governs it has to be built accordingly.