A home furnishings company had been paying for multiple storage platforms, often using identical data to make use of a specific feature only one platform had, and were tired of essentially paying a premium for a single feature.
What challenges were they facing?
The company felt like they were overpaying for an entire storage platform for basic file-sharing functionality. With companies continuing to raise costs, they decided to look into seeing if one of the platforms could be cut and they could find another way to share files.
Most company data was stored in SharePoint, but Dropbox was also used because it had been simple and handy for distributing large volumes of data and has a more user-friendly interface. However, the Dropbox tenant was essentially a replication of the same data in SharePoint, and this sprawl of data was becoming unwieldy and expensive.
Certain files and directories would be placed in Dropbox to be used as public versions of the same data in the SharePoint tenant and used for easy file sharing with granular permissions. Trying to do the same in SharePoint was determined to be challenging and risky, so Dropbox was being used to simplify sharing files with external parties.
However, as that data always originated from SharePoint, having a way to accomplish the same functionality with one set of data would be better; if such a thing were possible.
There was the problem of files getting out of sync. Making a duplicate meant there were at least two forms of the same data out there, and changing one wouldn't affect the other without setting up another integration. This would mean using yet another product to keep the platforms in sync, so another thing to maintain and pay for, which is the opposite of what the company wanted to do.
How did Couchdrop provide the solution?
SharePoint was an important part of the company's ecosystem, and they were using Microsoft 365 for other purposes, so using SharePoint as the primary storage platform made sense.
Initially, the company thought that creating SFTP users was the best option, but the files weren't always shared with the same people, so they would need to create a new user for every person or company.
Instead, the customer support team gave the recommendation to use Shared Links. Since Shared Links could be pointed directly to a specific file or folder in SharePoint, external users would be able to access the files directly using the same link. Adding a password and sharing it with each user ensured only the right people had access and that the same Shared Link could be used across different organizations.
As the files and directories shared were quite large, Couchdrop's generous bandwidth limits became a huge advantage. The team determined files could be shared as needed without having to worry about hitting a transfer cap that many other platforms had.
What results did they achieve?
The team confirmed that they would be able to accomplish everything they wanted to do with Couchdrop and SharePoint. As a result, the Dropbox account was no longer needed, and they were able to plan on ending their subscription.
By doing this, the company was able to reduce costs, keep a single copy of data, and simplify management resources by consolidating platforms.