Customer Profile:
Ellucian is the leading provider of software and services higher education institutions need to help students succeed. More than 2,400 institutions in 40 countries rely on Ellucian to help enable the mission of higher education.
The Challenge: Migrate From Network File Share to Box
With more than 3,000 global users and a 60% remote workforce, collaboration and file sharing among Ellucian’s staff was extremely challenging to manage with distributed network file shares. Certainly, it made sense to consider migrating from network file shares to a cloud storage provider. So Ellucian’s IT leadership set forth to enable business capability in a timely manner by leveraging cloud technology. The company then adopted Box as a means to satisfy the cloud storage needs of a diverse workforce. As a result, Ellucian’s IT department was faced with a new challenge to get thousands of users and more than 10 terabytes of content to the cloud. And they wanted to do so without disrupting business.
The Solution
“After selecting Box as the cloud provider, we searched for tools to migrate the content in an efficient manner. We had 3,500 users and 10+ terabytes of content,” said Ovidiu Diaconeasa, IT Systems Infrastructure Manager at Ellucian.
“DryvIQ offered an efficient and cost-effective solution to migrate our content to the cloud securely,” Diaconeasa said. After connecting with the DryvIQ team, Ellucian’s IT department was able to simply install DryvIQ on its servers. Then the migration of content from their network file shares could begin.
With the software’s advanced User Drive Linking functionality, it was incredibly simple to migrate users from their individual home drives to their new Box accounts. Now that the migration was well underway, Ellucian used DryvIQ’s Group Linking function to migrate its Group file shares and all underlying permissions to Box as well. Ultimately the goal is to eliminate network file shares globally.
The Results
“A few months ago we flipped the switch and disconnected everybody from their local file shares. Everyone is now using Box as their primary file-sharing solution,” Diaconeasa said.
With Box implemented, the staff is now storing and sharing content in the Cloud. Additionally, Ellucian’s IT department has seen a notable decrease in service calls from users requiring help with file-related services. “Now that they’re in Box, they have the option to keep versions of their documents and manage files on their own,” Diaconeasa said.
Furthermore, IT no longer has to spend valuable resources maintaining and updating its physical servers and backups/restores. Likewise, all content storage, sharing, versioning and collaboration is now done securely within the Box platform.
Ellucian’s IT department is simplifying how the company does business by enabling the global workforce to share and collaborate from anywhere, anytime. “Everyone expects an easier way to use technology nowadays,” Ellucian CIO Pradeep Mannakkara said.
Stellar Customer Support
“DryvIQ customer support has been extremely responsive and has consistently offered solutions to our complex requirements,” Diaconeasa said about the DryvIQ team.
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