With a project portfolio spanning the construction, industrial, medical and laboratory equipment, oil and gas, and IT sectors, Al-Balagh Trading & Contracting employs thousands of people to manage enormous volumes of data. But with a heavy reliance on local servers, equipping its project sites to manage that data was a slog, and the collaboration processes that connected those sites were broken.

As Al-Balagh’s project portfolio grew, these problems compounded – until Egnyte unified the firm’s data, across all its sites, in the cloud. Since then, site setup and data management have been a breeze, and the firm can scale its operations without slowing down.

Challenge: Siloed Local Infrastructure Hinders Expansion

Every day, at every project site that Al-Balagh operates, numerous stakeholders create, modify, and exchange various project-related files. Establishing the infrastructure necessary to facilitate this work was a multifaceted and time-consuming affair. At each site, the team needed to set up a local server, create folders for document storage and collaboration, and make sure a reliable power source and backup data storage was in place.

“It took us a week, at a minimum, to set up the local server and get all the other infrastructure ready,” says Ajo George, IT Manager at Al-Balagh. “And until that work was complete, the site wouldn’t be operational and people couldn’t start working.” This was a substantial enough bottleneck when the company was only operating six or seven project sites. But amid a period of strong expansion, Al-Balagh found itself confronting these setup delays at each of roughly 15 sites in addition to their head office – adding up to significant lost work hours.

Once a site was finally launched, the team ran into a new problem: with each site relying on its own siloed local infrastructure, there was no efficient, secure way to exchange files among sites and with the head office. These infrastructure silos also made it hard to replicate the firm’s content environment across all sites, creating a confusing lack of standardization. “At best, we were relying on email to send documents back and forth, which is generally not a good practice,” George explains. “At worst, we actually had content saved on CDs and DVDs, and people had to physically come to the office to pick them up. If, for example, we prepared a Request for Quote for a subcontractor, and five people needed to review it, we had to create five different CDs. It was a real drain on our time and resources.”

Solution: Unify All Sites – and Their Data – in the Cloud

Al-Balagh came into contact with Egnyte through an unusual channel: Microsoft. “We initially looked into Microsoft OneDrive to help us streamline site setup and scale our operations, but we struggled to govern access permissions and standardize the folder structure across every site,” George explains. “In the end, Microsoft ended up referring us to Egnyte.”

Egnyte provided a cloud-hosted environment for storing and managing files, eliminating the need for extensive local infrastructure installation at each site and greatly accelerating site startup times. The platform also enabled Al-Balagh to create a single folder structure that stakeholders could access from any project site, and to share files via secure links – all while asserting granular access controls via Egnyte’s permissions management functionality. These features provided needed relief from reliance on email attachments and physical discs.

“The move to Egnyte made it much easier to move users between project sites,” comments Mohamed Kunhi, IT Service Delivery Lead at Al-Balagh. “The folder structure is the same across all sites and projects, so when someone goes from one project to another, they know exactly where to find the data they need. That helps us avoid a lot of onboarding and confusion.”

Some of Al-Balagh’s project sites are located in areas with unreliable internet connections, which makes some clients wary of a file management environment hosted fully in the cloud. Egnyte presented a solution here as well – specifically, its Storage Sync product. As George explains: “In areas where we might not always have internet access, we still use local servers. But Storage Sync automatically syncs the latest version of all our content to the cloud environment as soon as internet connectivity is restored. That means we can still benefit from a centralized, universally accessible content environment, even in these far-flung areas.”

Benefits: Stronger Productivity and a Green Light on Growth

Since transitioning from local servers at each site to Egnyte’s unified, cloud-hosted environment, Al-Balagh has neutralized administrative delays and yielded enormous time savings that can be recycled into its projects. This has made the team more productive and enabled the firm to scale freely without fighting administrative headwinds.

“Thanks to Egnyte, it takes only one day to set up a site vs. a week or more,” says George. “Now that all of our project data, procurement data, RFQs, and everything else is accessible from any location, our subcontractors and other stakeholders can access it much more quickly and easily. It took about an hour for us to create, for example, four discs for four stakeholders. Now we can get those people the info they need in five minutes.”

Al-Balagh is leveraging a wide array of Egnyte’s feature functionality and looking to expand its use of Egnyte into areas such as security and compliance. “Egnyte’s integration with Microsoft facilitates real-time co-editing of Office365 documents, so that multiple stakeholders can work in the same document together. This helps us avoid file duplication and make sure people aren’t working on outdated versions of files,” Mohandas explains. “Looking ahead, we plan to learn more about Egnyte’s features related to ISO 27001 compliance and ransomware.”

All in all, Egnyte has proven to be a major driver of Al-Balagh’s broader digital transformation. The platform has virtually eliminated the firm’s reliance on paper and physical discs for content sharing, and has created a designated channel for document management that exists separately from email – a much more sound business practice. “Users now load their files into Egnyte, and that’s where those files exist from then on,” George explains. “No more photocopying, email sharing, or digital redundancies. Egnyte is our central destination for any content that people need to be able to access from multiple locations. It has helped us keep our processes unified across all our sites, which has paved the way for us to keep scaling our operations.”

Managing major construction projects during a global pandemic is no picnic. It requires dealing with enormous data volumes, facilitating collaboration among myriad stakeholders, and erecting large and complex edifices–all while health restrictions prevent most people from actually meeting on a job site.

After implementing Egnyte’s document management platform, the large UAE-based firm ALEC Engineering & Contracting expertly navigated these challenges, achieving rapid site startup, seamless remote collaboration, and easy management of large files.

Challenge: Project Complexity Outpaces Legacy Software

For ALEC, large and complex construction jobs are the norm, requiring collaboration among hundreds of staffers, often spread across various departments and offices. It also entails managing Revit files up to 11 gigabytes in size.

ALEC’s on-premises file sharing network posed challenges in several key areas when managing these projects:

Extensive project setup
At the start of each project, the system required extensive and time-consuming on-site prep work. “This involved setting up a physical server at each site, installing the necessary software, and building a folder structure for managing files,” explains Najib Dalank, Head of IT at ALEC. “Then we had to secure the necessary storage and establish security policies. And we had to do daily manual content backups on each system to meet the seven-year archival requirements of our projects.”

• Remote document management
  Without cumbersome workarounds, team members could only access the on-premises server while on site. “We had to virtualize machines to enable users to access content using the local network, and if we wanted to share a file with an external partner, we had to download it and then reupload it to a different platform,” Dalank explains. Dewald Smith, Project Director at ALEC, adds: “Even then, sometimes files were so large we had to add them to Dropbox and send them via a link, which would often expire and need to be resent.”
• Outdated documents
  With various stakeholders managing files on multiple local servers simultaneously, it was hard for someone to know if the file they were looking at was fully up to date.

Solution: Unify Dispersed Stakeholders Through Cloud Adoption

The ALEC team evaluated Egnyte as a cloud-hosted alternative to their on-premises file sharing network. “We started with a small proof of concept that went well,” explains Dalank. “We then used Egnyte for a leisure mega-project we would soon be developing.”

Soon after migrating data into Egnyte, it became clear that Egnyte’s cloud infrastructure was the answer to the issues the previous system had created. “Once our content was in the cloud, our team could immediately access both large and small files from anywhere with an internet connection, without the need for VPN connect,” says Dalank. “Content updates were immediately synced, files were automatically backed up, and it was easy to provision the right level of file access to stakeholders based on their role.”

These features were impressive enough. But perhaps what clinched ALEC’s decision to move forward with Egnyte was Egnyte’s Storage Sync product. “We had previously tried other systems but kept running into synchronization issues between cloud and local versions of files, even small ones,” says Dalank. “But we had great synchronization results with Egnyte. We were able to upload and download terabytes of data via Storage Sync, and it worked perfectly.”

As the project moved forward, Egnyte’s cloud infrastructure and file access controls made sharing and collaborating on files easy for internal and external stakeholders alike. As Smith explains: “Staff can access the latest versions of design documents on their iPads rather than printing them out, gathering on site to review them, and hoping they’re still up to date. And we can send subcontractors and clients a link to view all the reports and other materials they need, knowing we have the controls in place to prevent people from accessing the wrong things.”

Describing Egnyte’s impact on project startup, Dalank says: “With everything in the cloud, we no longer had to implement a ton of local infrastructure at each project site. Where it used to take three or four weeks to get everything ready, Egnyte allowed our team to start collaborating in just one day, whether remotely or on location.”

Benefits: A Steady Ship as Project Size and Complexity Grow

In the midst of the mega-project, COVID hit. But with Egnyte’s cloud infrastructure streamlining remote collaboration and file sharing, the project was hardly affected. “Only Operations were allowed to visit job sites during COVID,” Smith explains. “But Egnyte enabled us to keep working together anyway. We could access the cloud remotely and do whatever we needed.”

Dalank adds a note on the team’s experience navigating the Egnyte platform: “The biggest piece of feedback we’ve gotten is that Egnyte offers the same mapped drive experience our users recognized from the previous system. It’s so intuitive for people to find the files they need, which has been a huge driver of user adoption.”

And it’s not just the ALEC team who has benefited. With smoother collaboration, fewer content silos, and stronger business continuity, ALEC’s clients are happier as well. “We’re able to collaborate with clients with more transparency, and that has really built trust and strengthened those relationships,” Smith explains. “We can tell them: ‘Here’s a link you can use to access our platform and all the reports you need.’”

Since the mega-project opened to the public in 2023, Egnyte has been ALEC’s go-to document management system and is currently in use in about half a dozen major projects. ALEC is now looking at myriad other areas in which their partnership with Egnyte could be beneficial. “We’ve already successfully pushed Egnyte for a big project with one of our partners in Saudi and signed a new enterprise agreement for 1,000 licenses with Egnyte, which has been transformational,” comments Dalank. “Now we’re deep in the weeds exploring how Egnyte can serve us in areas from workflows to integrating with Microsoft Teams to AI to information security–we’re going for ISO 27001 compliance in 2024, and Egnyte will be critical for that.”

Summing up his experience, Smith says, “Our projects, and the data involved with them, are always becoming more complex. But with Egnyte, there’s no downtime, or waiting period to access content, or complaining from the team. That makes it easy for us to take on increasingly complex projects more quickly and effectively. If you have a large staff, or people collaborating remotely, or large data volumes, or issues with access controls, Egnyte is the tool for you.”