CHALLENGE
Barton Willmore needed a solution that would enable them to use cloud storage while allowing architects located throughout the UK to work collaboratively on files of a challenging size.
Solution
Panzura CloudFS allows their best people to work together collaboratively regardless of where they are. And, Panzura Data Services allows the Barton Willmore IT team to monitor and protect their network from just one dashboard.
Industry
Cloud
Consolidating Data While Boosting Productivity
When the UK’s leading independent planning and design consultancy began to exhaust their on-premise storage and could no longer work collaboratively across their 13 offices, they knew they needed a solution that would allow them to leverage cloud technology.
The Challenge
With a workforce of 350 employees distributed across multiple locations, and individual servers in every office, Barton Willmore was struggling with data islands. At any given point, it wasn’t clear which server held the most recent version of a file, and sharing resource-intensive architectural design files across offices was consuming a painful amount of bandwidth.
Not only was their file system preventing their team from working effectively together but managing and organizing their data was becoming increasingly costly.
The Requirements
Barton Willmore needed a solution that would enable them to use cloud storage while allowing architects located throughout the UK to work collaboratively on files of a challenging size, without causing data sprawl created by versioning. Their end product is presented as a data file, so accessibility, security and protection were imperative.
The Solution
After selecting Microsoft Azure as their cloud storage provider and conducting a proof of concept with both Panzura and another global cloud file system provider, Barton Willmore realized Panzura’s realtime access to data would give them an enormous productivity boost.
Choosing Panzura’s CloudFS not only allows them to have their best people work together— whether they’re in Edinburgh, Cardiff, London or Southampton—but it also lets them divert resources to where they’re needed at a moment’s notice. When a team in one location needs additional resource or a specialist designer, people in other offices can step in to help.
The Management Overlay
With storage and collaboration addressed and enormous gains in productivity realized, Barton Willmore chose Panzura Data Services to allow them to search, monitor and analyze data and activity across their entire network.
Whether they need to identify unusual employee behaviors before reputational and financial damage can be inflicted on the company or monitor a heat map of what data is hot, warm and cold based on access, Data Services allows them to see exactly what’s going on—over an extended period of time—at a very affordable cost.
Our data is our gold and without it there is no Barton Willmore. It really is very important to us to know that our data is consolidated, easily accessible, secure and protected with Panzura.