How Alta Planning + Design Saves $220k+ a Year and Delivers Projects 10% More Efficiently with Egnyte

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.

“Egnyte as a company has been extraordinary about listening, understanding, and responding to our needs. We have a partner in Egnyte who really does care about the success of our company.”

Robert Gibson

Director of Information Technology

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 With no central control or governance of content, users could unknowingly work on an outdated or duplicate file, or overwrite a colleagues’ work if two people were in a file simultaneously.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.