Creative Advertising Company Consolidating Dropbox and Wasabi

The company operates within the creative advertising sector, managing a creative department responsible for producing a wide range of media assets including video projects, photos, and other digital content. Over the last decade, their work archive has grown to 150-200 terabytes, reflecting a substantial volume of data requiring efficient storage and management.

Currently, the company uses a combination of cloud and local storage solutions. Their primary cloud storage was Dropbox, which initially offered an unlimited plan but discontinued it about a year ago, leaving their data in a "limbo" state—stored but inaccessible for new uploads. To compensate, the company has been downloading around 50 terabytes of data and reorganizing it across Wasabi (an S3-compatible cloud storage), a NAS device (such as Synology), and specialized photo storage platforms like SmugMug for photos. For active project work, they rely on LucidLink, which enables real-time streaming of files but becomes cost-prohibitive at scale. The company also uses media management tools like Frame.io and Iconik for content organization and collaboration.

- **Cost Prohibitive Scaling:** LucidLink and Frame.io are expensive for large-scale data, making it difficult to sustain access to the entirety of their archive. - **Fragmented Storage:** Data is spread across multiple platforms (Wasabi, NAS, SmugMug), complicating management and accessibility. - **Limited Cloud Storage Options:** The removal of unlimited plans by Dropbox forced the company into a complex and inefficient hybrid storage setup. - **Migration Overhead:** Transitioning to new systems requires data migrations and reformatting, which add effort and complexity. - **Inadequate Unified Media Management:** Existing tools do not fully integrate storage and media management in a cost-effective way, necessitating multiple subscriptions.

Shade offers a unified platform designed to replace LucidLink while also integrating media management capabilities similar to Frame.io and Iconik, all at a significantly reduced cost. Shade requires data to be stored on an S3-compatible bucket formatted to their specifications, enabling efficient streaming and file system management. The company would migrate their existing data into Shade’s compatible storage format, benefiting from centralized management and lower storage costs by leveraging Shade’s partnership with Backblaze B2. This approach consolidates active project streaming, media asset management, and archival storage into a single, cost-effective workflow.