4 Reasons Ramboll Consolidated File Data in the Cloud

We have a great new customer story to share, and this is one of my favorites, as it highlights both the obvious and unexpected benefits of consolidating your file storage in the cloud. Headquartered in Denmark, the engineering, architecture, and consultancy firm Ramboll has 16,500 employees in 35 countries and 300 remote offices. Ramboll relies on a collaborative business model, so the company naturally wanted a file storage infrastructure capable of supporting that.

While Nasuni’s global file sharing and collaboration tools helped drive Ramboll’s transition to cloud file storage, this certainly wasn’t the only factor. As of today, Ramboll has consolidated 3 PBs of file data in the cloud with Nasuni. Our case study goes into more detail, but here are a few of the high-level benefits Ramboll is enjoying now that it has modernized with Nasuni.

1. Simplicity

Ramboll had been relying on different physical and virtual storage systems, backed by SnapMirror, along with a variety of file sharing and collaboration solutions. Managing this global infrastructure was a hassle, forcing IT to oversee multiple updates on a weekly basis. Now the company has a single global file system that takes care of storage, backup, and collaboration at 300 offices — and one management console to control it all.

2. Flexibility

Ramboll began with a 200 TB deployment, but when the coronavirus pandemic forced a shift to a remote workforce, the company quickly scaled up to 3 PB. That sort of agility and flexibility wouldn’t be possible with a storage solution that scales on physical hardware. With Nasuni, customers can easily expand capacity on demand. “We were pleasantly surprised by how easy it was, and how each Edge Appliance can deliver the same file server experience as our NetApps using a much smaller local disk footprint,” says IT Project Manager Morten Madsen of Ramboll.

3. Optionality

The case study has all the details, but let me just say that Ramboll ran into a difficult situation with one of its data centers in India that threatened to stall productivity. Thankfully, the company had the foresight to offload its file data in that location to Nasuni and deploy an Edge Appliance VM in Azure. So, when the office went dark, local users could connect to file shares in Azure and continue working.

But there’s a larger story here as well. IT addressed the immediate threat to productivity, but Madsen and his team also deployed and tested a response that could be used anywhere on the globe — key for a company operating in 35 countries.

4. Efficiency

The fewer hours its engineers waste waiting for files to download, upload, or transfer, the better. Delays increase engineering hours on a given project and reduce margins. By accelerating local file access, file sharing, and global collaboration, Nasuni minimizes that unproductive downtime and maximizes profit.

File Storage for the Future

I hope you’ll take a look at the story, which puts all of this in context, but the other advantage of Ramboll’s transition to Nasuni is the fact that the company now has a file storage plan for the future. Nasuni addressed Ramboll’s immediate needs around global access, WFH support, and backup, but it also supports the company’s vision. As Madsen explains: “We don’t want to be bound by data centers. Nasuni makes a lot of sense as it gives us unlimited object-based file storage in the cloud, and offers the flexibility of moving or deploying a new appliance within a two-hour time frame and making the data available somewhere else.”