Mead & Hunt Tackles Infrastructure Costs, File Collaboration Bottlenecks, Security and Compliance

How a Century-Old Engineering Firm Cut IT Costs by $250K While Growing 50% Through Hybrid Cloud Transformation

"Over the last 2 years we have increased headcount by 50% to 900 people and reduced IT spend by $250k with the Panzura and Workspot joint solution. We are now operating as one collaborative team across our company, increasing productivity across all employees."

—Andy Knauf, CIO

Impact Snapshot

• $250,000 IT cost reduction over two years while simultaneously increasing headcount by 50% to 900 employees through consolidated hybrid cloud infrastructure.
• 50% storage reduction by phasing out legacy NAS/SAN hardware at more than 30 sites, freeing capacity and eliminating ongoing hardware refresh cycles.
• Eliminated collaboration bottlenecks with global file locking, enabling distributed teams across more than 40 offices to work on the same project files simultaneously without conflicts or corruption.
• CMMC/FedRAMP-ready compliance achieved through centralized identity and access management, meeting federal contract requirements that legacy vendors couldn't support.
• 2-minute threat detection with reliable disaster recovery through CloudFS Instant Node failover and advanced Threat Control capabilities, including built-in high-availability and business continuity
• Better performance than physical workstations with improved response times for all users, and reduced energy consumption with less equipment in each location

The Challenge: When Rapid Growth Creates Isolated Islands

For over a century, Mead & Hunt has been a multi-disciplined engineering and architectural firm using design applications including Autodesk Civil 3D and Revit. As the firm experienced rapid expansion and opened additional locations, including a new headquarters, the company faced a new challenge: each office became a separate "island," making it difficult for project teams in different locations to collaborate and share data.

Mead & Hunt's IT team, led by CIO Andy Knauf, needed a solution to enable real-time collaboration and increase productivity while simplifying the IT structure and reducing costs. The firm wanted a hybrid cloud file platform that could modernize their storage and collaboration, phasing out their legacy Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Storage Area Network (SAN) systems. This would also enable fast and secure file access for their growing, distributed teams.

Expensive, unsustainable expansion model: Mead & Hunt's rapid growth was becoming prohibitively expensive. Each new office required new equipment—servers, racks, and networking hardware—and the IT staff to install, configure, and manage it. This led to significant equipment costs and high operational burdens, especially for scaling project teams across more than 40 geographic sites.

Geographic limitations constraining growth: The company was determined to find an IT solution that would support its growth objectives and allow it to bid on projects anywhere in the world, hiring talent beyond a typical 50-mile radius. However, the legacy infrastructure made distributed collaboration virtually impossible.

Engineering workflow bottlenecks: Mead & Hunt wanted to give its employees the flexibility to work from anywhere while collaborating effectively in a common data environment. However, they were experiencing several critical bottlenecks. Users complained about file locking issues, sync delays, the risk of file corruption, and friction with cross-site collaboration.

Security and compliance gaps: Security and compliance were critical concerns, especially with federal infrastructure work. The firm faced increased federal contract requirements for CMMC/FedRAMP, and its legacy vendors lacked the necessary strong security controls.

Business continuity vulnerabilities: They needed a solution with high availability and fast failover for business continuity and disaster recovery after experiencing previous downtime incidents. In addition, there was a lack of real-time reporting, audit trails, and a centralized way to manage file access policies.

Technical Requirements

• Eliminate the need for on-premises infrastructure at each new office location
• Enable real-time collaboration on CAD and Revit files across distributed teams
• Resolve file locking and corruption issues that plagued multi-site projects
• Meet federal compliance requirements including CMMC/FedRAMP for government contracts
• Provide high availability and disaster recovery capabilities
• Reduce IT operational burden and infrastructure costs
• Support flexible, remote work while maintaining security and performance

 The Solution: CloudFS and Workspot for a Complete Infrastructure Paradigm Shift

Using Panzura's CloudFS and Workspot's cloud workstations, Mead & Hunt tackled key challenges, including high infrastructure costs, collaboration bottlenecks, and strict security and compliance requirements. This successful integration simplified IT operations, boosted user productivity, and enhanced business resilience.

Previously, establishing a new location meant delivering and installing a full rack of new hardware—servers, a SAN solution, and networking equipment. This would take a week or more and require an IT person from headquarters to be on-site for several days to complete the installation and then continue to tune and adjust the setup for a few weeks after that. With CloudFS and Workspot, this process has been completely transformed:

• Panzura CloudFS provides an enterprise-grade hybrid cloud file system with a global namespace for distributed teams, offering file resilience, improved productivity, and disaster recovery
• Multiple CloudFS nodes were deployed on-premises and in the cloud, with Azure AD and Okta providing identity and policy enforcement—configuration can be completed in days rather than weeks
• Global file locking resolves file locking and corruption problems that occur when multiple remote users work on the same project file simultaneously
• CMMC compliance support helped the company meet its emerging compliance needs for government and federal projects
• Workspot cloud workstations provide CAD engineers and designers with access to high-performance computing delivered from Azure, accessible from any location with much lower device costs
• Rapid deployment and scaling across different cloud regions to meet business demand—expensive servers are no longer needed, and physical workstation refreshes are eliminated
• Legacy hardware retirement by consolidating file storage and migrating project files, Mead & Hunt largely retired its legacy NAS and SAN hardware
• CloudFS Instant Node failover protection seamlessly switches operations to a standby node, ensuring continuous data availability and minimal disruption after weather events and natural disasters
• Multi-region disaster recovery with additional Workspot cloud workstations in alternate Azure regions, ready to be activated in the event of a major outage

Using Panzura CloudFS and Workspot's cloud workstations, Mead & Hunt tackled key challenges, including high infrastructure costs, collaboration bottlenecks, and strict security and compliance requirements. This successful integration simplified IT operations, boosted user productivity, and enhanced business resilience.

The transformation has been profound. What once required a week of on-site work and ongoing infrastructure management can now be deployed in days with minimal operational overhead. Engineers who previously struggled with file locking conflicts now collaborate seamlessly across more than 40 offices. Federal compliance requirements that once seemed insurmountable are now met through centralized controls.

For engineering and architectural firms facing similar challenges with distributed growth, aging infrastructure, and federal compliance requirements, the Mead & Hunt story demonstrates that modern hybrid cloud architecture isn't just about technology replacement—it's about removing the constraints that limit business growth and enabling the flexible, collaborative work environment that today's distributed workforce demands.