Case Study Breakdown: Sonic Union

Like many businesses, the COVID-19 pandemic forced a lot of quick changes, one of them being remote work. For Sonic Union, a media and entertainment company located in New York City, going remote was a bit more complicated with massive file sizes and the need for quick collaboration.

Traditional NAS

Sonic Union used a traditional NAS setup with on-premises storage. Employees would access the central NAS server from their desktop computers. This central NAS unit was also backed up to a second location. With everyone in the office, there wasn’t much need to change a working system. Until, that is, the need to support remote workers.

Pandemic Pivot

During the pandemic, Sonic Union’s employees worked remotely. The main obstacle in doing so, however, was ensuring that users had reliable and consistent access to the main data storage. Because of the constant downloading and uploading of large folders and file sizes, this also needed to be quick so as to not disrupt a time-sensitive workflow.

Latency Issues

At first, Sonic Union tried a mixed bag of solutions: existing systems, cloud storage applications, and VPN/FTP. But due to the complexity of multiple systems and the increased latency in working with large audio and video files, it was clear another solution was needed.

Enter Morro Data

Morro Data was introduced as the CloudNAS solution that would bring the ‘server’ right to each user’s location, virtually. With a hybrid format and fetching functions, Morro Data’s CloudNAS offered the most needed solution by not forcing users to download new files after every work session. Rather, they’d be ready to access right away.

CacheDrives

With session files as large as 20 GB, it just didn’t make sense to have users download the massive files over their home internet connection. Morro Data’s CacheDrives allowed for an easy solution as users could access the large files through pre-fetching and syncing. This meant data sat locally instead of remotely making working on large files much easier, and most of all, much faster.

Security

In addition to ensuring user accessibility, file integrity and system efficiency were also paramount. With the manifold duplication of files on a traditional NAS server, folders could quickly become cluttered with users working on the wrong one, giving access to the wrong version, or deleting it entirely. Through versioning, however, users with the correct access privileges always accessed the most recent version of the file.

24 Months Later

Sonic Union still enjoys the many benefits of using CloudNAS. The ease of remote accessibility has allowed them to hire from multiple locations, even thousands of miles away, creating an even more cohesive and collaborative business. In addition, the many hours spent archiving, decluttering, and backing up files is a thing of the past. CloudNAS makes it easy, automatic, and time-saving.

Learn more about Morro Data today.