AEC industry leader Kleinfelder accelerates collaborative workflows and strengthens ransomware protection
About Kleinfelder
Kleinfelder has been improving clients’ transportation, water, and energy infrastructure since 1961. The firm’s team of 3,000+ engineers, scientists, and construction professionals work across 100 offices in North America and Australia.The challenge
Kleinfelder works to grow their assets and collaborate across teams and locations.
After Director of IT Infrastructure Andy Kimura joined the company in 2019, his team moved Kleinfelder’s storage and data protection infrastructure to the cloud. At first, the company upgraded from siloed file servers and backup solutions to Azure Files and Azure File Sync. This worked well, but a more collaborative model was needed as the company grew through acquisitions, as talent frequently worked together between offices and regions.How Nasuni helped Kleinfelder
Nasuni enables Kleinfelder to continue to scale and grow.
While the original switch from traditional storage and backup to Azure Files eased many of Kimura’s concerns, Kleinfelder began experiencing some capability limits. Nasuni is designed and architected to scale without limits inside the object store, and its platform design allows for an expanding set of capabilities, from advanced ransomware protection tools to data intelligence solutions like Nasuni IQ.Implementing Nasuni ensures high-speed performance.
Kimura acknowledged that IT professionals in his position often worry that a cloud solution like Nasuni will lead to performance problems. “We can say this confidently because we’ve implemented Nasuni everywhere, that performance is not something to worry about, especially for AutoCAD and GIS-type workloads,” he explained.Nasuni delivers rapid ransomware recovery and intelligent ransomware protection.
Nasuni’s cloud-native, continuously versioning file system allows a completely different approach to disaster and/or ransomware recovery relative to backup. “Nasuni basically points back to the file before it was modified,” Kimura explained. “Having the confidence that you will be able just to go back to a point in time when you need to is really comforting.”Nasuni engineers developed additional tools designed to help customers identify and contain ransomware attacks earlier. “One of the really cool things about the Nasuni platform compared to Azure Files is that it actually knows when a ransomware event is happening,” Kimura said. “You can basically black hole the source IP that’s initiating the attack so that it stops.” This helps companies get started on recoveries faster.
Nasuni IQ offers AI to Assist with Kleinfelder’s Projects
As of this writing, Kleinfelder has not implemented Nasuni IQ, but Kimura and his team are keenly interested in the tool and Nasuni’s role in using AI going forward. The firm has already built an Azure OpenAI tool that allows its users to interact with structured datasets using natural language — to figure out, for example, which engineers have experience designing specific projects, such as bridges. “I’d love to be able to do that against the unstructured data we have in Nasuni because we have a lot more data there,” he said. “That’s the next frontier.”Nasuni’s hybrid cloud allows Kleinfelder’s IT team to sleep better.
One of the more impactful results of the move away from traditional data protection to the cloud has been psychological. “If there’s anybody on the fence about moving to a cloud-based system, I would say that it does work and that you should move forward,” noted Kimura. “Ultimately, as a steward of the data, you’re going to be able to sleep better at night knowing you don’t have to worry about tapes or some kind of local backup.” Kimura quickly adds that this applies to both Azure Files and Nasuni. “For us, the move to Nasuni was about having more capabilities,” he said. “That was our goal. That was the ultimate. With Nasuni, we can do more, and the value of data protection built into the platform is hard to quantify. But I know I sleep better at night. That’s a huge ROI.”We had a lot of data to move, but we had a lot of help from Nasuni. We used Nasuni Professional Services, and we had a great Nasuni engineer helping us get the migration done correctly, and in a timely way.
The Nasuni difference
The Nasuni File Data Platform enables Kleinfelder to unify its unstructured data across all locations, providing low-latency access and seamless collaboration through Azure object storage. With features like intelligent ransomware protection, advanced data recovery, and support for enterprise-scale migrations, Nasuni empowers Kleinfelder to achieve its goals while reducing IT complexity.Industry: AEC
Use cases: NAS consolidation; global file synchronization; data protection; data intelligence
Benefits: High-speed global collaboration; intelligent ransomware protection; effortless scalability; fast edge performance; AI readiness