Cloud NAS Relieves a Marketing Agency’s File Sharing Headaches
Upward
Founded in 2003 in Springfield, Ohio, Upward is an integrated full-service marketing agency. The agency has experienced rapid growth throughout the years and now employs more than 70 employees across 7 offices located throughout the United States and Europe. As the company grew, so did its storage and file sharing needs. But like most agencies of its type, the knowledge and skillsets of its employees and founders reside around a wide range of marketing specialties, not IT. As a result, these needs were largely neglected, leaving thousands of large, high-value design files sitting on the laptops of individual employees with no way to protect them against catastrophic loss from a disk failure, theft, or misplacement.
Industry
Media & Entertainment
Regions
US
Deployed Solutions
Global File Services
Challenge
Upward’s storage needs had grown to more than 30 TB, yet there was no formal storage solution in place. In addition, designers often needed to collaborate with their colleagues in other offices which was complicated by the inability to effectively share 2 GB files across antiquated vehicles such as email.
Several years ago, the company inherited an old web-based Mac fileserver from an acquisition. “ It worked well for the employees in the local office,” says Chris Haag, Development Team Manager at Upward. “ But the problem was that all remote designers had to get somebody in the local office to send it to them so they could work on it, and then when they were finished the person in the local office would have to put it back on the server. The process was manual, time- consuming, and wasn’t always done correctly – and sometimes it wasn’t completed at all.” In addition, the fileserver was yet another piece of hardware that needed to be managed, creating another pain point for the already IT-strapped organization.
Then in 2017, Chris bought a QNAP system which he hoped would finally solve these challenges. “It worked, but it required 10 to 20 hours per week of my time to keep it up and running,” says Chris. “It actually cost me more time, rather than saving it. Before I knew it, I had become the IT guy; I no longer had time to do my real job at the agency.” Chris also learned that while the QNAP was good for backing up to the cloud from a single location, but it could not handle Upward’s multiple offices.