Data Collaboration:

Challenge Amidst Data Growth & Company Expansion

Our customer, an engineering and planning company in Springfield, delivers significant engineering related projects around the globe. With time, they had to restructure their company for an expanding business. Before that, each of its office was its own data center.
Cross-site data collaboration and synchronization was a big challenge for it. The company restructured itself recently. It spanned teams from a single office to go across numerous offices. As a result, these teams had to collaborate with each other for projects completion. The restructuring resulted in data synchronization issues.
Multiple teams had to collaborate on BIM and CAD models like they were in a single office. Cross-site data collaboration was, therefore, becoming a challenge as members of the team had to work through a slow process. Moreover, the company had to dedicate employees for handling and synchronization of files manually.
“We were jumping through hoops trying to manage these islands of data in a reliable fashion, making sure that each file was consistent and accessible for effective collaboration between our offices,” said an IT manager of the company.
Apart from cross-site data collaboration challenges, the company was on the verge of consuming available storage capacity. They needed to scale storage and have it setup so that it’s faster and supports high IOPS. To mitigate these challenges, the company needed a solution that tackled this cross-site data collaboration challenge.

The StoneFly Solution:

StoneFly Enterprise Cloud Storage in Azure

StoneFly solution to the challenge of cross-site data collaboration was Azure cloud storage. With this cloud storage solution, the engineering company was able to store, manage, control, and access data from anywhere, at any time. With StoneFly Azure cloud storage the company’s IT environment provided simpler and fast data accessibility for users located in multiple offices around the globe.
“Managing data and collaboration between on-site and offsite teams has never been simpler. IT staff can create, manage, control and scale storage repositories in a few clicks. We can have the storage we want, when we want it and we can control who gets access to it. StoneFly’s storage solution and Azure cloud has turned data management into a valuable asset” – said the IT manager of the engineering company.
StoneFly enterprise cloud storage enabled the IT environment of the engineering company to setup the kind of storage they need (NAS, SAN, or NAS + SAN) in Microsoft Azure cloud. IT administrators could easily manage and control all their storage resources from a single management interface. While users could access Azure cloud and have access to the data they needed all the time.
The combination of Azure’s geo-replication and StoneFly’s enterprise-grade data services (like snapshots, replication, automated storage tiering etc.) made collaboration easier, faster, secure and reliable for the engineering company and their branch offices.

The Results:

Data Storage & Collaboration – Easier, Better & Reliable

After configuring StoneFly Azure cloud storage, the company enjoys a process-friendly data storage experience. Here are some of the benefits they continue to gain from StoneFly’s enterprise cloud storage solution:

• Seamless Data Collaboration:

StoneFly Azure cloud storage significantly made data collaboration better. It improved data accessibility among teams located in different locations while keeping the files synced at the same time. Any change in the file was made visible to everyone across the network sharing StoneFly cloud storage solution.

• Scalability:

Scalability is no longer a concern for IT administrators in the engineering company. If they need more storage space for a specific user group or branch, they can allocate additional storage capacity easily. Similarly, when storage quotas aren’t needed or when storage capacities aren’t used; it’s simpler to reduce dedicated storage space to keep cost implications in check.

StoneFly gateway technology makes scalability business-friendly by liberating IT environments from the worries of file-size limitations in Azure.

• Faster Data Transfer:

StoneFly cloud storage delivered data services like replication, automated storage tiering, and thin provisioning. The integration of StoneFly technology enabled the company IT environment to make data transfers faster, automated, and reliable.

• Reduced Costs:

Data services like thin provisioning and data deduplication facilitates the engineering company to reduce the CapEx and OpEx costs of their cloud storage solution. Additionally, the purely cloud-based storage solution incurred fairly less costs compared to a hybrid or on-premises storage solution.

As the company continues to leverage StoneFly’s innovative storage solution, managing storage resources in Azure cloud are easier and simpler; this too makes the cloud storage solution affordable.