3 IT teams that took control of file infrastructure

Most file access infrastructure upgrades usually happen after the pain becomes impossible to ignore.

But the strongest IT teams tend to move earlier, before migrations become urgent or operational drag becomes systemic risk.

The signals usually appear gradually:

• Rising support tickets

• Workarounds becoming routine

• Performance issues spreading across teams

• Costs increasing without the experience improving 

The organizations in this article recognized those patterns early and made architectural changes before the problem became harder and more expensive to solve.

When storage performance stops scaling: EVS Engineering

EVS Engineering reached a scaling limit. 

Over six years, the company grew from 30 to 200 engineers, expanding across offices and time zones. What had worked as a simple, office-based setup (on-prem file servers with VPN access) started to break down under that growth.

“Opening or saving a file could take five to ten minutes,” said Wally Warwick, IT Manager at EVS.

For a team working with large AutoCAD and engineering design files, that delay was continual. And at scale, it compounded:

• Engineers losing meaningful time every day just waiting on files

• Productivity constrained by infrastructure, not expertise

• IT pulled into ongoing VPN troubleshooting and file access issues

Nothing was technically broken. But the system was no longer viable for how the team worked.

EVS explored alternatives, including VDI environments and other cloud collaboration tools, but ran into new limitations: complexity, cost or tools that didn’t behave like a true filesystem. A planned $80K SAN upgrade was on the table, but it raised a bigger question:

Would more infrastructure actually solve the problem or just extend it?

That question became the turning point, a recognition that the system itself was no longer scaling with the organization. That’s when Wally found LucidLink.

The results:

• File access reduced from 5–10 minutes to under 30 seconds

• ~200 billable engineering hours recovered per month

• $80K SAN investment avoided

• File-related IT workload significantly reduced

Files opened when needed, collaboration stopped being shaped by delays and IT could stop wasting hours managing workarounds.

This is what the performance tipping point looks like in reality. EVS’ systems weren’t failing, but they couldn’t keep up with how the team actually worked.

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When multi-office file access  becomes too complex to manage

Widseth’s environment didn’t fail either, but it became too complex to sustain.

With 250 users across 12 offices, the firm relied on a traditional multi-site setup: cloud-backed storage with caching appliances in every location, combined with VPN access for remote work.

On paper, it worked.

In practice, the cracks showed up in how the system behaved day to day:

• Large CAD and BIM files were slow to open and save

• Each office depended on a local appliance — creating single points of failure

• Remote access relied on VPN performance that didn’t hold up under real workflows

• Multiple users across locations introduced risk of file overwrites

• IT had to manage and maintain hardware across every site

The visible issues were performance and reliability. 

The underlying issue was structural: cost and complexity were increasing together.

Every new office meant:

• Another appliance to deploy and maintain

• Another failure point to account for

• More time spent managing infrastructure instead of supporting teams

Widseth evaluated alternatives, including on-prem and WAN acceleration, but each added complexity.

The answer was removing the appliances entirely. LucidLink replaced the multi-site setup with a single cloud filespace, accessible from any location.

The outcome: 

• 25% cost reduction compared to Nasuni

• No branch hardware required across 12 offices

• Consistent CAD performance regardless of location

• Reduced support burden with fewer file-related and VPN issues

Performance doesn’t depend on location, there’s no dependency on hardware and costs no longer scale with expansion.

Why Projective rebuilt file infrastructure at the architectural level

Projective needed to build a new environment from the ground up.

Strawberry Skies was designed as a fully managed cloud environment for creative production, bringing together storage, compute, applications and workflow into a single system that enterprise IT could govern and creative teams could actually use.

The solution needed a filesystem strong enough to support everything built on top of it.

As the team developed the platform, they evaluated more than 20 filesystems and storage systems.

Most worked in isolation. Few held up under real-world creative workloads:

• Large media files accessed globally

• Multiple users collaborating in real time

• Professional tools like Avid, Adobe and Autodesk expecting consistent filesystem behavior

Systems that worked at a storage layer often broke down when exposed to production workflows. 

Performance became inconsistent, permissions broke expected workflows and collaboration introduced delays.

For Projective, that level of unpredictability wasn’t compatible with the platform they were building.

The system needed to support two things simultaneously:

• Enterprise IT governance, auditability and control

• Creative team speed, access and simplicity

That meant finding a filesystem that behaved as both infrastructure and a backbone for secure creative workflows. LucidLink was the only solution that held up.

Outcome: a filesystem foundation for global creative infrastructure

• A cloud file streaming platform for the core storage and access layer

• Enterprise-grade governance and performance delivered together

• Real-time collaboration across distributed creative teams

• A consistent foundation underpinning the entire Strawberry Skies platform

Rather than adapting infrastructure to the platform, the platform was built on infrastructure that already matched how it needed to behave.

The shift happening across IT teams

As IT teams look for more modern ways to manage file access, there are common trigger points.

Sometimes it starts with friction. Workflows slow down, people find workarounds and over time those workarounds become part of how the team operates.

Other times, it’s a clean slate: a decision to build something new that won’t run into the same issues. Either way, there’s a moment where the existing approach no longer holds up.

You start to see it when:

• Friction becomes routine

• Workarounds become workflows

• Complexity starts compounding

In the examples above, that’s when teams took action.

They stopped trying to optimize what they had, and started rethinking how it should work.

That led to a different way of working, where:

• Files should stream, not sync

• There should be a single source of truth

• Data shouldn’t be replicated across endpoints

These are architectural decisions rather than features.

Where file access infrastructure change actually begins

Infrastructure rarely fails all at once. It degrades gradually, until the cost of waiting becomes higher than the cost of change.

None of these teams waited for something to break. They acted before the warning signs became a bigger problem.

If any of this feels familiar, it’s probably a sign your current setup isn’t keeping up with how your teams actually work.

For a deeper breakdown of how teams are modernizing file infrastructure, explore our enterprise IT file access modernization guide.