How Projective helps IT deliver secure creative workflows with LucidLink

About Projective

Projective provides Strawberry Skies, a fully managed cloud platform designed for creative teams working in media, entertainment, advertising and marketing.

The platform brings together the full creative infrastructure stack: storage, compute, applications and workflow management, into one managed environment.

Creative teams can run complex production workflows using tools like Avid, Adobe, Autodesk and DaVinci Resolve, while enterprise IT teams retain full control over security, governance and infrastructure.

At the center of it all is LucidLink, the cloud filesystem that gives distributed teams instant access to project files from anywhere without changing how they work.

Today Projective supports large global organizations across media, telecom and marketing, with creative teams spread across North America and Europe.

Background

Projective’s first platform, Strawberry, was created more than a decade ago to solve a persistent infrastructure challenge inside creative organizations.

Production environments were often split between two worlds.

Certain creative tools (especially Avid) required tightly controlled storage environments. These systems typically lived outside the broader enterprise IT stack. 

Meanwhile, tools like Adobe Creative Cloud could run on enterprise storage. But without a structured workflow layer, projects quickly became messy. And assets lived everywhere. 

Permissions were inconsistent. Teams struggled to keep projects organized.

Strawberry helped bridge that gap, allowing creative tools to run on enterprise infrastructure while maintaining the structure production teams rely on.

Taking it to the cloud

As creative teams became more distributed and organizations started shifting infrastructure to the cloud, Projective evolved that idea into Strawberry Skies, bringing the same production-ready framework to cloud infrastructure.

But one problem remained.

To make the platform work, they needed a cloud filesystem that behaved like enterprise on-prem storage, while still enabling global collaboration.

The challenge: enterprise governance vs creative agility

Creative organizations live at the intersection of two very different priorities.

Enterprise IT teams are responsible for protecting company data. That means enforcing strict requirements around identity management, compliance, encryption and auditability. In many cases, data location and sovereignty rules also come into play.

Creative teams, on the other hand, need something simpler: fast access and fewer barriers.

Without the right infrastructure, that tension creates friction everywhere:

• Project folder permissions can take days to process through internal helpdesks

• Onboarding a freelancer may require multiple systems and approvals

• Retrieving archived content often means waiting on storage administrators, sometimes only to receive the wrong files

• Even reviewing access logs can require digging through multiple systems

Production slows down, IT teams spend more time firefighting and risk increases on both sides.

Projective could deliver enterprise-grade governance, security and search for on-premise systems, but what about organizations moving toward cloud-first environments? 

Finding LucidLink

When the team began developing Strawberry Skies, they evaluated more than 20 different filesystems.

Most cloud storage platforms looked promising at first. But once real creative workloads entered the picture (large media files, distributed teams, professional editing tools) the limits became clear.

The reliability mattered.

Projective needed a filesystem they could build a production platform around, something predictable enough for enterprise IT and fast enough for creative teams. LucidLink delivered both.

Teams get local-drive-like performance with large media files, permissions that behave like enterprise storage systems and an architecture that supports the workflow automation Strawberry Skies depends on. 

Real-time collaboration becomes possible, no downloads, uploads or version chaos.

It became the storage layer beneath the entire platform.

The solution: a structured creative platform powered by LucidLink

Strawberry Skies orchestrates the creative workflow and LucidLink provides the filesystem that makes fast, global access possible.

Andrew describes the relationship simply, “LucidLink underneath Strawberry Skies makes storage questions disappear. It behaves exactly the way our platform expects.”

Secure project-based access

Inside Strawberry Skies, each project gets mounted as a workspace, taking away guesswork about where assets could be on the shared storage. 

Everything is self contained and folder permissions are applied automatically. When the project is closed, the workspace is unmounted and those permissions are removed

A simple idea, but a big impact.

Users only see the files tied to the projects they’re working on. Security stays tight and teams don’t have to worry about assets accidentally landing in the wrong project.

Enterprise governance built directly into the workflow

Strawberry Skies integrates directly with enterprise identity and security systems.

Organizations can connect authentication through Azure AD or OpenID, enforce multi-factor authentication and maintain detailed audit logs. Encryption at rest protects data, while access tracking provides full visibility into system activity.

Andrew shared, “thanks to LucidLink’s enterprise filesystem capabilities, we can manage permissions, access rights and security policies while maintaining a full audit trail for IT teams.”

IT governance becomes part of the workflow and not a blocker.

Infrastructure that scales with creative projects

LucidLink streams project data on demand, so teams work with files as if they’re stored locally.

Editors and artists can collaborate using familiar tools like Avid, Adobe Creative Cloud, Autodesk and DaVinci Resolve, while project data remains centrally managed.

Completed projects can be archived to the appropriate on-prem or cloud storage, while proxy assets remain searchable inside the platform.

The results: faster operations with enterprise security

With LucidLink, Projective delivers a cloud creative platform that balances speed and security.

Faster onboarding and collaboration

Freelancers can be onboarded in seconds, with access granted in just a few clicks, no IT tickets required.

Less infrastructure friction

Customers can move from demo to proof-of-concept quickly, without waiting for servers or storage. 

This shortens traditionally long enterprise sales cycles and reduces operational risk.

Support for hybrid and cloud environments

Many organizations are still running hybrid environments.

With LucidLink underneath Strawberry Skies, customers can combine on-prem storage with cloud production workflows. Project data can move between environments without breaking how teams work.

Enterprise governance without slowing production

Teams with strict compliance requirements still maintain full control over governance policies, access auditing and archive rules.

At the same time, creative teams work at production speed.

Projective has also seen the platform lower the barrier to entry for enterprise creative infrastructure. 

Teams can start small with just a few terabytes and a handful of users and scale over time without redesigning their environment.

What’s next 

As more creative organizations move toward hybrid and cloud infrastructure, Projective continues expanding Strawberry Skies.

Upcoming initiatives include deeper enterprise integrations, expanded hybrid storage architectures and new capabilities for secure collaboration across global teams.

With LucidLink as the filesystem underneath the platform, Projective can keep building creative infrastructure that gives IT teams the governance they need while letting creative teams get on with the work.