From connecting its remote workers to managing transaction-heavy CAD files smoothly and quickly, the engineering firm QK had major logistical gaps to fill just to be able to do its work. Even after a large-scale server migration that first tried to leverage Panzura, then Azure Files, the company suffered from poor cross office and remote collaborative experiences that kept civil engineers mired in workarounds and slowed its projects.

QK realized it would take a fully cloud-hosted solution to facilitate smooth file management and move projects forward. Egnyte was that solution.

Challenge: Foster Engineering Work Without Excessive Workarounds

Kristoffer Law, IT Administrator at QK, recalls the file management paradigm at the company when he started there: “We had independent file servers siloed in each of our offices, which made cross-office work nearly impossible.” To address this, the firm relocated each server to its central office, creating a unified data repository that its handful of remote staff could access via VPN.

But with one issue solved, another emerged: QK works largely with CAD files that include countless XREFS, any of which could be subject to multiple edits and access requests at any time. This added up to major bandwidth demands that the system had trouble satisfying. “CAD files are so transaction-heavy, which created a huge slowdown, and solutions were hard to find,” explains Law. “Vendors like Riverbed didn’t work well with GIS, which is a huge part of what we do, and virtual desktop interfaces caused a lot of latency.”

Then came Covid. Although the team’s data was newly centralized in QK’s Visalia office, the civil engineers working with that data were suddenly dispersed across the region. Demand for remote access skyrocketed, and VPN connectivity proved unsustainable at such a large scale. “We had started using Panzura, which was good at handling our CAD transactions, but not at facilitating direct file access for remote staff,” says Law. “Engineers had to use VPNs, which were so prone to crashing and latency that folks often downloaded files and worked on them locally. That, in turn, created huge version control issues.”

With a makeshift infrastructure consisting of software vendors, VPN connections, virtual desktop interfaces, and locally-stored design applications, the team found themselves spending nearly as much time managing their technology as advancing their projects. They knew something would need to change.

Solution: Egnyte Reduces Complexity for a Frustrated Team

Law discovered Egnyte after an external collaborator on a GIS project sent him a link to a file via Egnyte’s secure link sharing functionality. “It was everything we needed,” says Law. “With Egnyte, everything is stored in the cloud, so civil engineers can access and manage files directly anywhere with an internet connection.”

Law points to several specific ways in which Egnyte facilitated both large-scale remote file access and collaboration on large CAD files:

• Faster performance
  Frequent XREF transactions, which come with the territory for CAD-intensive firms like QK, were highly taxing on local servers, VDIs, and other systems the company had tried. But with Egnyte, Law says, “All of that computing demand shifts to the cloud, and with Egnyte’s Desktop app, things are fast and smooth regardless of file size.”
   
• Eliminating geographic limitations
  Any changes made to a file sync to Egnyte’s cloud environment immediately, ensuring nobody is working on an outdated version of that file. “With Egnyte’s PDF editor, our construction management folks can go out to a site and work on mobile devices without later having to manually copy their changes from the device into a file server. Instead, those changes sync automatically, which is not just convenient, but eliminates the risk of losing content in transition,” Law explains. “We don’t even need a constant internet connection. For instance, we have GIS technicians working in areas with unreliable internet. With Egnyte, they can work on GIS files offline, and their updates sync as soon as they get a connection. It’s totally smooth, even with heavy GIS content like parcel data in San Bernardino County, which is just massive.”
   
• File locking
  QK is a heavy Civil 3D user, with multiple people often working in the same Civil 3D file simultaneously. Previously, when more than two or three people were working on a file at the same time, synchronization conflicts would arise, with stakeholders overwriting each other’s changes. But with Egnyte, Law says, “we have a single file repository that locks, so if one person is in a file, another person can’t get in until the first person finishes. That prevents the overwrites and synchronization problems we were dealing with.”

Benefits: Long Distances Feel Short, Large Files Feel Small

To date, QK has migrated roughly 8 terabytes of project data into Egnyte, spanning disciplines from CAD to GIS and beyond. The team is now working faster and more efficiently, regardless of where stakeholders are located or the size and complexity of the files they’re working on.

“Right before Egnyte, we were using Azure Storage with a VPN connection to manage our workflows,” Law says. “Since switching to Egnyte, our CAD folks are working about 40% faster. In other transaction-heavy areas like GIS, we had one user who used to take over an hour to do some work on a geoprocessing tool––with Egnyte, it now takes two minutes.”

Law speaks to other ways Egnyte has outperformed other solutions. “Basically, if you look at a Venn Diagram of Egnyte and the other systems we tried, Egnyte is basically a circle encompassing those other systems while also including tons of other great features. I love Egnyte’s auditing and cybersecurity features, which we couldn’t get elsewhere unless we paid an exorbitant additional cost. Looking ahead, we’re exploring integrations between Egnyte and other platforms like Autodesk and Procore, and Microsoft co-editing.”

The impact of Egnyte has rippled across QK’s organization and partner ecosystem and come back to Law through glowing feedback from everyone who has interacted with the platform. “Once we moved to Egnyte, our civil engineers breathed a huge collective sigh of relief,” Law explains. “People are thrilled not to have to operate over VPN or deal with bottlenecks anymore. They’ve reported considerable improvements in speed. We’ve also been able to handle staff moving to remote regions with slow internet connections by instructing them to use Egnyte’s Offline Sync function for large project files. I’ve even talked to one of our MSP partners who has seen how much we’ve benefited from Egnyte and now they want to sell it to their other clients.”

Of all the systems with which QK has tried to address its challenges in recent years, only Egnyte has acted more as a help than a hindrance, empowering the firm to adapt to the remote-first norms of the post-Covid era without sacrificing speed or performance. Whatever changes the future may bring, Law is confident he can count on Egnyte: “For Egnyte to stop working, the internet would somehow have to vanish out of existence. Short of that, I know it’s there for us.”

PIB Group (‘PIB’), an international insurance intermediary, has placed acquisitions at the heart of its growth strategy–and the company has been on a roll. “We’ve acquired over a hundred companies in seven years, including insurance brokers, underwriters, and firms in parallel industries,” says Jason Ozin, Group Information Security Officer at PIB Group

These acquisitions have made the company highly diversified, with insurance offerings spanning business, auto, home, and more. But it has also created challenges in centralising and managing all the data from acquired companies or leveraging this data with AI to help employees work more efficiently. Egnyte has been key to overcoming those challenges.

Challenge: Avoid Data Sprawl in the Wake of Multiple Acquisition

When PIB acquires a company, it also acquires the company’s data. That data might reside in any number of different file management systems, whether local servers or one of the many cloud platforms available on the market. This introduced a potential side effect of PIB’s acquisition strategy: data sprawl.

As a result, one of PIB’s first goals after it acquires a company is to migrate that company’s data from whatever platform it was previously using into a centralised repository. “We didn’t want to have all our subsidiaries’ data fragmented across all their legacy platforms,” Ozin explains. “We needed a way to migrate their data into a centralised system on our side, but without having to transfer everything via USB drives or take it to some specialist. Going through that process for every acquisition would have taken forever.”

Cracking the code on efficient migration was just step one–the company would then have to organise and refine the vast repository of data it had acquired so it would be feasible to navigate. After that, they would need to establish workflows enabling multiple stakeholders, from multiple acquired companies, to work on files without conflict. As Ozin says: “We have a lot of projects requiring a lot of teamwork, and we wanted to avoid a situation in which people were messaging each other and saying, ‘Can you get out of this document so I can get in?’”

Creating a centralised data repository of this kind required next-gen cloud technology. But this created another challenge: “There aren’t many truly forward-thinking cloud platforms serving the insurance industry, and as a result, people working in this industry are often somewhat cloud-naive,” says Ozin. “For us to introduce a cloud platform without friction, that platform would have to preserve people’s preferred way of working as much as possible.”

Solution: Centralise, Secure, and Augment Data in Egnyte

As soon as PIB made the decision to pursue an acquisition-focused strategy, they chose Egnyte as the cloud platform to facilitate the large-scale data migration this would require. Ozin points to several ways in which Egnyte proved the perfect cloud solution for addressing all the data management implications of PIB’s acquisitions:

• Data migration
  With Egnyte, PIB could migrate content from acquired companies’ legacy systems into a centralised repository in a few simple steps. “Egnyte provides tools that make data migration extremely easy,” Ozin says. “We can sync with SharePoint or OneDrive and pull files directly into Egnyte or use an appliance to pull data from a company’s local servers.”
• Organising large data volumes
  With so much data and headcount from acquired companies, it’s critical for PIB to be able to govern user behaviour and keep data volumes manageable. “Egnyte sends us alerts for unusual activity, which has helped us catch instances of people accessing files they shouldn’t access,” says Ozin. “And Egnyte’s cold storage option makes it easy to archive old, out-of-use files so we’re not wading through them to get to the files we need.”
• Secure sharing
  PIB frequently needs to share documents containing sensitive information with external stakeholders, including mainstay documents in the commercial insurance space like bordereaus. Egnyte makes it easy to do so securely. Ozin explains: “We’ll typically produce a bordereau in our MI platform, but then put it into an Egnyte folder so that we can share it with insurers via Egnyte’s secure links.”
• AI Automation
  An early adopter of AI for document insights, PIB is turning unstructured data managed in Egnyte into a virtual expert coworker, creating a more productive experience for employees. Dimitris Pertsinis, Head of Data for PIB Group, explains: "Egnyte helps us automate the process of gleaning insights from our data. We work with hundreds of insurers, each with their own Terms & Conditions. Now, our brokers can query across multiple documents in natural language to search for terms and conditions and compare files." Expedited data insights free up team members' time for client-facing activities.
• Easier co-editing
  Egnyte’s co-editing functionality made it easy for large and diverse groups of stakeholders to avoid conflicts over simultaneous file access. “Once people realised they could edit files at the same time, or even screenshare and work on files together, they were really pleased,” Ozin says.
• Familiar navigation
  With such frequent acquisitions, PIB spends a lot of time onboarding new users. Training new users in a technology platform significantly different from their legacy platform would extend onboarding times to an untenable degree. But as Ozin says: “With Egnyte, we can make their file store look exactly the same as it did in their previous employment. They’re effectively using the same G drive or H drive they’ve always had and can’t tell the difference.”

Benefits: Better Efficiency and Governance During Acquisitions

To date, PIB has migrated roughly 40 terabytes of data from acquired companies’ legacy systems into Egnyte. “Egnyte has become the centralised repository we needed for everything from business-as-usual content like Word and Excel files to insurance documents like policies, bordereaus, and claims,” explains Ozin. “And the migration process has been astonishingly easy. Doing the migration via Egnyte has probably saved us thousands of hours compared to most alternative methods.”

Some of those savings are likely attributable to Egnyte’s intuitive navigation, which has minimised the training and onboarding burden. Indeed, in combining the benefits of cloud storage with the familiarity of a traditional mapped file drive, Egnyte has cloud-enabled a user population that was previously, in large part, cloud-naive. “The fact that we can take data from a legacy system, migrate it to the cloud, and secure it without the end users realising anything has changed is a huge plus.”

Ozin’s next task is to ramp up his use of Egnyte’s archiving and sensitive content detection functionality to keep PIB’s content repository as organised and lean as possible. As an example, Ozin says, “We’ve just started running a purge of files that haven’t been touched in four or more years and archiving them. That alone could cut our file store almost in half, which will make it much easier to navigate and to zero in on high-priority sensitive content alerts.”

Neither Ozin nor anyone on his team has any doubt that Egnyte was the right choice to create a centralised, cloud-hosted content repository at PIB. “My team loves Egnyte,” Ozin says. “They love the granularity, they love the control, and they love that it makes data migration so easy. Egnyte is definitely up there with the best modern cloud applications.”