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Global Creative Company Streamlining Cloud Collaboration Workflows
Company Situation
The company operates in the creative production industry with nearly 20 years of experience delivering multimedia projects globally. Their team manages a mix of video, graphic design, and other creative assets, servicing companies with active projects and maintaining an archival system for completed work. The scale of their storage needs is moderate, around 6 to 9 terabytes of archived data and 2 to 4 terabytes of active project data, with a retention policy of five years for company assets.
Existing Workflow
Currently, the company uses a combination of cloud-based Network Attached Storage (NAS) solutions and traditional archival methods. Active projects are managed in a cloud NAS environment using tools like Suite Studios, while archival data is stored primarily via LucidLink, supplemented with tape drives or physical drives for long-term retention. Google Drive and AWS have been tested but found to be either too slow or not intuitive enough for large file management. The company’s workflows include multimedia files such as videos and InDesign documents, necessitating seamless access, editing, and archival capabilities.
Issues with the Existing Workflow
High Cost: Existing cloud NAS solutions, including LucidLink and Suite Studios, are expensive relative to the value delivered.
Internet Dependency: Performance and accessibility are heavily constrained by variable internet infrastructure quality globally, particularly in regions with unreliable or costly connections.
Complex Onboarding: Many platforms require complicated setup processes, especially on Mac systems, which impacts ease of adoption across the team.
Limited Intuitive Asset Management: Tools lack comprehensive, creative-focused features such as robust asset search and indexing, making archival retrieval cumbersome.
Inflexible Archival Processes: Unarchiving files is slow and requires extra fees, complicating company updates and revisions on archived projects.
Fragmented Storage: Using multiple platforms for active work and archiving creates workflow inefficiencies and management overhead.
How Shade Would Change Their Workflow
Shade offers a cloud NAS solution designed specifically for creative teams, integrating seamless mounting and access to assets with a focus on intuitive management. The company’s trial installation indicated that Shade’s onboarding was simpler and faster, reducing friction for team members. Shade’s platform incorporates advanced asset search and indexing capabilities, enabling efficient retrieval and management of archived projects. While internet infrastructure remains a limiting factor, Shade’s architecture optimizes performance within these constraints and aims to reduce costs compared to current providers. By consolidating active and archival storage into one streamlined system, Shade could simplify workflows and reduce reliance on multiple disparate tools.
Benefits
- Simplified and faster onboarding process for creative teams
- Cost-effective cloud NAS solution with transparent pricing
- Enhanced asset indexing and search tailored to creative workflows
- Unified platform for active projects and archival storage
- Improved accessibility and management of large multimedia files
- Reduced operational complexity and management overhead
Technologies Used
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