McMillan Pazdan Smith Unifies File Access Across Rapidly Expanding Architecture Practice

Growing Firm Uses Panzura CloudFS to Bring New Studios and Acquisition Partners into One Unified File Architecture Fast

Impact Snapshot

• Rapid onboarding of new offices and acquisition partners into one unified file architecture across the firm’s Southeast footprint
• Faster post-acquisition integration without forcing teams to maintain separate file environments
• Consistent, local-feeling file access for project teams across distributed studios
• Real-time global file locking to prevent overwrites and version conflicts during multi-office collaboration
• A scalable file foundation that supports continued growth without rebuilding storage office by office

McMillan Pazdan Smith is a rapidly expanding architecture, planning, advisory services, and interior design firm serving clients across the Southeast. With a growing studio footprint and practice areas spanning civic and cultural, commercial, healthcare, higher education, K-12 education, and industrial, the firm depends on seamless collaboration across people, places, and project teams.

That need has become more important as the firm grows. Since 2022, McMillan Pazdan Smith has expanded through new offices, studio moves, and a series of acquisitions including Virgo Gambill Architects, Jumper Carter Sease, Fuqua & Partners Architects, Hecht Burdeshaw Architects, and most recently MCA Architecture, which joined the firm in March 2026 and expanded its industrial design practice.

For a growing architecture firm, expansion creates an immediate operational challenge. They must bring new offices, teams, and acquired partners into the same working environment quickly, without forcing months of file migration or disruption to active projects.

Panzura CloudFS gives McMillan Pazdan Smith a single unified file architecture that extends across studios, new offices, and acquisition partners. Instead of treating every location as a separate file archive island, CloudFS gives the firm a global hybrid cloud file architecture where project data is consolidated, protected, and made available to teams through familiar file workflows.

“In a multi-office environment, latency and synchronization issues on large files once made true collaboration prohibitive, forcing us to isolate data to single locations. Since the firm adopted Panzura CloudFS, that concept has vanished. Data now belongs to the organization and is equally accessible from any location. Even with over 500 users and several hundred people hitting the system daily, we have never had a single performance issue.”

Jerry Griffin
Director of Technology
McMillan Pazdan Smith

The Challenge

Growth creates opportunity, but it also creates complexity.

For McMillan Pazdan Smith, expansion means more talent, more markets, more practice depth, and more client relationships. It also means more project files, more offices, more legacy file environments, and more teams that need to work together quickly.

Architecture firms do not have the luxury of stopping work while IT reorganizes file infrastructure. When a new office joins the firm or an acquisition comes on board, active projects continue. Designers need to keep working. Project managers need continuity. Clients expect progress

Traditional file infrastructure can slow that process down.

Each office may have its own file servers, naming conventions, backup processes, security model, and application dependencies. Acquired firms bring years of project history and active client work that cannot simply be lifted into a new environment overnight. Without the right architecture, every new office becomes another file-data silo, and every acquisition becomes another integration project.

The goal was not just to modernize file architecture. It was to build a file foundation that could keep pace with the firm’s growth strategy.

• Bring new offices and acquired firms into a unified file architecture without months of migration work
• Preserve familiar, local-feeling file access for architects, designers, and project teams across every studio
• Reduce version conflicts when teams collaborate across locations
• Protect project data against ransomware, accidental loss, and operational disruption
• Scale with continued expansion and support a repeatable integration model for future acquisitions

The Solution

McMillan Pazdan Smith selected Panzura CloudFS to create a unified file-data foundation. CloudFS gives the firm a global file system that extends across offices while maintaining a single authoritative data set in cloud object storage. Active files are cached close to users, so teams experience fast local access while working from the same shared file architecture.

That model is especially valuable during growth and acquisition.

Instead of standing up a separate storage strategy for every new office, McMillan Pazdan Smith brings locations into the CloudFS architecture and gives teams access to the same global namespace. Acquired partners do not need to work indefinitely from legacy file systems. Their project data is integrated into a broader, consistent architecture. Teams work from one shared foundation, without copying files between offices or maintaining duplicate repositories.

CloudFS also supports real-time global file locking, edge caching, immutable data, and multi-protocol access across SMB, NFS, and S3, with support for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and S3-compatible object storage.

Supporting a Multi-Studio Practice

McMillan Pazdan Smith's work spans multiple practice areas and geographies, each depending on coordinated project data. A healthcare project may involve technical drawings, compliance documentation, consultant coordination, and client deliverables. A school project may require collaboration across planning, interiors, architecture, and construction contract administration. An industrial project may involve large technical files and coordination across multiple teams.

CloudFS gives McMillan Pazdan Smith a consistent way to support that work across studios. Whether a team is in an established office, a newly opened studio, or a recently acquired partner location, users access shared project data through the same file architecture.

Real-time global file locking helps prevent users from overwriting one another's work as more offices, expanding practice areas, and faster growth bring more teams into shared files. It is not enough to connect offices. The platform also protects the integrity of collaboration.

Improving the User Experience

File access only works if the user experience holds up. Architects, designers, planners, and project managers should not have to think about where a file lives or which office owns the project data. They need to open files, coordinate work, and keep projects moving.

CloudFS supports that experience by caching active data close to users. New offices and acquired partners access shared project data without forcing every interaction to travel back to a distant file server. Frequently used files remain close to the teams working on them, while the authoritative data remains part of the global file system.

CloudFS also helps the firm improve resilience by storing file data in immutable form and supporting recovery from previous versions, reducing the risk that accidental deletion or other data loss disrupts active project work. And it helps reduce IT complexity. Without a unified architecture, every new office adds another set of storage problems such as capacity, backup, permissions, replication, performance, disaster recovery, and support. CloudFS replaces that pattern with a repeatable model. When the firm expands, IT focuses on connecting teams to the global file architecture rather than designing another isolated file environment.

Results

The result is not just a better file system. It is a more scalable growth platform. By giving the organization a unified file architecture, Panzura CloudFS helps the firm move faster after expansion events. New offices are connected. Acquired partners are integrated. Project data is accessible through a common foundation. Teams collaborate without waiting for slow, manual file infrastructure projects to catch up.

For McMillan Pazdan Smith, this turns file architecture into a growth enabler. Their rapid expansion requires more than additional offices. It requires a file foundation that can bring people, projects, and acquired partners together quickly.

CloudFS provides that foundation with a single unified file architecture for distributed project data, fast access for local teams, real-time locking for collaboration, immutable protection for resilience, and a repeatable model for integrating future growth.

As McMillan Pazdan Smith continues to grow, CloudFS helps ensure every new office becomes part of one connected firm faster.