Transcript for "One Platform, 80 Job Sites: Inside Walsh Group's Cloud-Native Transformation": Hello, everybody. So, joining me today is Rob Munch from The Walsh Group. I'm Scott Goss, a solutions architect here at Nasuni covering our global accounts. We're gonna talk a little bit about Rob's experience, with Nasuni and his role at Walsh Group, what his life was like before, what his life is like now that he has Nasuni deployed, and some of the things that they're thinking about for the future. So with that, Rob, would you like to tell a little bit about yourself? Absolutely. My name is Rob Munch. I've been at the Walsh Group. I started way back in 2001. I left and then came back in 2006. I'm sorry. Left in 2006, came back in 2011, and have been here ever since. I am the IT network infrastructure operations manager here, and I've worked with Nasuni for about the past fourteen, fifteen years. Oh, wow. So very early customer. Indeed. Well, it's great to bring that experience to this discussion. So, Rob, tell us a little bit about The Walsh Group. You're a fourth generation, company, 4,000 employees, a locations, projects like LaGuardia under your belt. You know, give us a sense of the scale and the complexity of the of the data environment that you manage. Sure. We have about, oh, maybe 4,000, 4,500 employees in our, non non trade employees, at Walsh. So those would be people who are, in construction management or, in the field or out the field managing jobs or in, say, for example, the IT department or any of our other service groups. And, oh, boy. We have we dabble. We dabble. We are in, civil construction, so we'll be building buildings, high rises. We are in construct we are in transportation, so we work on bridges, highways, runways, as you're referencing to, LaGuardia. And then we also have a water division where we're working on water treatment plants, water purification plants, etcetera, etcetera. Wow. That's that's a pretty diverse portfolio of projects and some pretty cool ones too. So tell me specifically how your role plays into the the support of these projects? Because these are large projects. They're they're not small by any stretch. So IT is a critical component. Correct? Correct. Our our job sizes vary from we may have a job where there's one or two people, out in an office, managing a job to a 100 to 200 people. And the Zuni what the Zuni does, it helps us is with our, data management and accessing the data for the job sites. So at any one point, we have, oh, a 150, 200, 250 job sites running throughout the country. And we use Nasuni as our our our data store cloud data storage solution provider. And, at at some at some locations that are large enough that warranted, we'll actually have an edge appliance on-site. But more and more of our job sites will not have a an edge appliance on-site, and we just leverage the the the low cost the the lowering cost of high speed Internet to come back to, a couple of strategic points to access our edge appliances and access their data. So it sounds like we simplify, your job considerably when you're spinning up new job sites then. Absolutely. Absolutely. When we get notified of a job, we can usually have a job sites folder where they're gonna store all their data up and running within the day so that the proper people are accessing the proper information and, can can get get started on storing and editing their data right away as opposed to storing it on one's own hard drive on on one's laptop. Oh, okay. Well, so this is actually a good segue into give me a paint a picture of what your life was like before Nasuni. Now I know this is going back a few years, but what what would it look like, 80 sites, spinning up a job site like LaGuardia, what would it look like with traditional storage, traditional compute versus, cloud object store like Nasuni? What it looked like beforehand was every job would get a server. And on that server, we would have a probably a one terabyte hard drive, and all that data was stored on that hard drive. That data was backed up by a third party, and and the name of that party escapes me. And if we were to have an issue with, a hardware failure, we could get the data back from our third party backup solution provider. However, it would take days, if not weeks, for them to, if a successful backup, occurred, they would put all that data onto a drive and then have to ship it back to us. And, we'd have to either install it or mount it externally. And, it was, when there was a some sort of a hardware failure, it was a a a dramatic loss in productivity. When we went to Nasuni, we're able to do restores in in minutes as opposed to days. So if we get a request that comes in, we can go on our NMC, go to where we we need to go and restore the data, and it's accessible in just a few minutes as opposed to having to as opposed to our end users out on-site having to wait days, if not weeks, to get their hardware back to get their data. Okay. So that I mean, it brings up a lot of interesting questions. Right? Mhmm. So when we're talking about data silos that are spread across job sites, and then having to to repatriate that data, that must have really been a lot of work and a lot of complexity trying to do that because you don't manage one project at a time. Right? I would assume, you know, with the size of Walsh Group that you have multiple projects going on at any given point. So the complexity of keeping tabs of all that data, managing all that data, and then repatriating it from those servers at those remote job sites had to be a very time consuming and complex enterprise. No? Yeah. Absolutely. When we would, it it took us a while to spin up a server for each particular job, build that, ship it out there, shipping costs there. If there are any issues during the course of the job, we would have to, you know, address those. And then after the job mobilized, we would get the data back and I'm sorry. We would get the server back. We would have to upload our server to, upload that data to another solution we were using. Once we brought Nasuni into the fold, we started, with a kind of a we started with Nasuni as our solution where we would store all the data for the jobs that were demobilized. So we would take all the data off of the server and upload it into New Zealand. And we would use DFS and a shared map shared network a map network drive, excuse me, and have it, and that was the location to where these people would access their data once the job was demobilized. Fast forward to where we made the the overall solution. Now when a job demobilizes, they can pull the plug on their power, pull the plug on their Internet. All we do is make a DFS change, and there's no downtime. There's no waiting for data to be accessible. It's and it's all accessible via the same path. So it's significantly easier for our end users, much less cumbersome, and much less downtime with, trying to access the data once our our physical job site office has demobilized. Okay. Well so, I mean, all that's pretty interesting. Right? Because a lot of our customers are are still running into those types of issues. Mhmm. But it also begs the question, how did this impact collaboration? Right? Because if you have civil engineers that are working on the same project in different locations of the country working off of local data, how do they collaborate with each other previously? Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Previously, it was it was a pain. I'll just say that. And and Nasuni just made it much more, seamless, and and allowed for that collaboration where we'll have estimators who would maybe at different parts of the country who, are are are wanting to lend their their expertise on a certain aspect of a particular job. So we would have estimators on the East Coast working on the same estimate, the same files with, with our estimators here in the Midwest. And the nice thing is it would you know, the the the collaboration was there where, we had one file that, they were they were editing. Maybe it was an Excel spreadsheet or maybe it was some other application. But, they, you know, they could go in there and, they were all accessing the same document. But, no, it it made Nasuni made the the collaborative necessity much much more approachable and and and and available, frankly. Okay. Well yeah. And that's that's one of the big values that that New Zealand brings to the table, right, is is speeding, collaboration. What do they say? The speed of IT. Right? So we're we're making it so that we can we can do things in a more real time environment today than we've been able to do historically as an industry. Right. Now so, I mean, we're talking about big projects, but you also have temporary projects, right, temporary job sites that pop up, things that you have to pop up and tear down. What did that look like before Nasuni, right, because you talked about having to deploy servers, I mean, in the context of today where the cloud providers are consuming every available compute platform, it's making it harder for, AEC customers to even get a hold of compute. So and and this is not the first time. Right? So what would that look like with these pop up sites if you had to send out hardware and get these sites prepped prior to Nasuni? Because I I have to believe Nasuni makes it a lot easier now. Absolutely. Absolutely. I kinda touched on what we did before where we would build, a specific job site server. The for for some of our larger jobs, those will require a physical server, and we will, put a a virtual edge appliance out there for the job to use. What we've our our our tactic now is we've reduced our our our hardware footprint. We're trying to reduce our hard foot footprint hardware footprint across the board. Yep. And and now leveraging Internet, which is, for all intents and purposes, become a lot cheaper, we kind of have our our our job sites coming back to strategic points throughout the country, to to access their data. So when we mobilize a job, really all they're really really all the the hardware they need out there is a router, a switch, a UPS, an access point or two, and that's it. As long as we keep those in stock, we can overnight those to a location. Our end users can kinda plug everything in via a diagram we've created, and they're up and running in in within twenty four, forty eight hours of when, after their Internet gets installed. So Nasuni certainly allowed that process to, become significantly faster than what it was previously. Yeah. No. I mean, it it it makes sense. Right? Because in my experience, when you're when you're spinning up these these temporary projects Mhmm. And there's a large amount of hardware associated with it, disk, compute, networking, all that stuff that goes with that, it it it taxes a lot of IT environments, because you're managing more than one project. Right? You could be managing, you know, dozens of projects saving on time. So hardware is constantly coming and going and keeping track of all that, you know, wiping servers, preparing them for the next job site. That's a lot of work, so that you've been able to take that complicated process and shrink it down to you have router switch APs on on hand, you ship them out when a site pops up. That's gotta alleviate the amount of strain on the IT department dramatically, I would think. Absolutely. We can we can actually walk around in our supply closet now. Servers, on the floor. So No. And it makes your it makes your business users happier too. Right? Absolutely. Absolutely. No. It's it's it's made things you're a 100% correct that the the overhead, the hardware managing it, repurposing it is was just burdensome to the point where it was affecting the ability to do our job where we're actually servicing our end users out there. So when they when they call us, we weren't you know, we certainly have more availability now to to support the the problems that they're having and kinda give our end users a better product for them to use. Right. Now that we're not stuck in this kinda overhead management of servers. So no. It's it's it's it's been it's made a a huge difference for us. Now, I mean, I'm I'm I'm curious. Did you guys have an issue with shadow IT prior to deploying to Suny? Because I would think that, you know, if if job sites or if business users were impatient to get started waiting on you to ship out hardware, they might try to get their own, laptop and a Synology or something and try to spin it up on their own. Is that something you experienced or not necessarily? A little bit. From from a storage perspective, it was a smaller, a a small percentage, of that where someone would get something like a Synology drive. We still run into issues more so from, hey. We don't have, Wi Fi in this area. Let's just buy something off Amazon and and throw it in there. But from a source perspective, it was a a small, a small percentage. Honestly, what we ran into was more so, extra hard drives. People would buy those and and throw them on the machine and source stuff there all the time. So that certainly was an issue. But with with the availability of, of Nasuni and, all they do all they all our end users have to do is basically go to our, map network drive. It's significantly easier for them now. So that So you point. Right? So talking about, you know, people using external drives, thumb drives, whatever. Mhmm. That creates a whole different set of issues in terms of corporate compliance, data security, client, confidentiality. So how does how do you see the move to Nasuni resolving or making those things easier for you to manage? It just takes that out of the equation, really. It it takes the this the the the need for people to go buy these external hard drives or USB drives as you referred to. There's no need for it anymore. They just they know all their data is there. They know all their data is backed up, and and it and it's accessible by by those that need it. So, we're we've gotten significantly fewer complaints or or or tickets issued where, you know, my computer died or my actual hard drive died, I've lost all my data. That's what there's there's not too much we could do to help you in that regard. But if you have your data up in the Nasuni, our end users have learned that if you have your data up up there, it's gonna be safe, and and we can help support you there. Right. And that that goes back to your earlier point about, you know, prior to Nasuni, there was an issue with data recovery if there was data loss. So, you know, with the move away from, you know, a type of shadow IT where people took storage into their own hands, and they're using the cloud storage as they need because now they have easy access to it. They have good performance. Mhmm. How does that look for you now in terms of recovering files if there's either an accidental deletion or a malicious deletion? It's it's made our it's it's it's made everyone's lives really easier across the board. Our end users know they can submit a ticket to to their IT department, and we can usually turn that around within the day, if not sooner. Right. And then for us, it's it's a, you know, it's a few mouse clicks, when we're working on our our, on our NMC here. And they have their data back. We can restore, you know, I'll often be on calls. And if it's small enough with the the file or folder small enough, I can be on a call with someone and start up the restore and say, alright. Let me know when you see it there, and a few seconds later, it's there. So it's, it it's made that process significantly easier. The the one thing that, the one thing where Nasuni seems to or is is adding more value is, then something called Nasuni IQ, where we are we are given more telemetry and visibility into what's going on with that data. And, for example, one thing you can do is find out where it find out if, for example, someone maybe had inadvertently moved data from one folder to another. So instead of just going to, restore data and then perhaps have duplicate data, we can actually find out who, not necessarily to to blame them or point fingers, but to find out who may have moved data and where. And this way, we can move it back to where it needs to be so we won't have duplicate data sitting on our network somewhere. So, that's that's a just an example of Nasuni kinda continuing to add value to their product. Yeah. That's I mean, that that's it's it's good to hear. Right? Because those are problems that a lot of people run into on a daily basis and, you know, that you have a solution around that is it's a testament to the value that we bring to the table. Yep. And it it it brings up another good point. Right? So you've had Nasuni for for fifteen years. So you had it during COVID. So a lot of customers that I worked with in prior roles really struggled during COVID because they weren't prepared for, remote work, work from home because their IT infrastructure wasn't set up that way. Right? Because data was data was siloed, you know, compute access, everything. How did Nasuni help prepare you guys for COVID and for work from home? In the historical way we used to set up jobs where we had a server on-site, the the expectation or or the the functionality was that you actually had to be on-site to access that data. Right. With Nasuni and utilizing DFS and, again, this map network drive, we we didn't have to change anything. When COVID came and everybody worked, every change to work remotely. So for us, that was one thing we didn't have to worry about. Our end users leveraged our VPN solutions. We're able to access the the map network drive and access their folder data. All the same permissions were in place. Everybody was accessing, the the proper data that they, have it to to which they have access. And it for us, we we didn't have to do anything. We were we were fully prepared, and as long as people had Internet connections and as long as their VPN was working, we were we were good to go. We did run into some issues with some we did find some issues with our VPN when it was saturated that much, but it's a whole another story. But accessing their data once their VPN connected was was good to go. Yeah. No. It's an amazing story. Right? Because you hit on the number one problem I had was data locality. When you have data disaggregated across job sites, it's a lot harder to work from home. Like you said, you had to mandate people show up. But, you know, when you have it aggravated aggregated into a unified file system in the cloud where it can be accessed from anywhere, definitely makes the story a lot easier. I know we're we're coming up on time here, so I wanna shift to, something we talked about, previously, you know, looking ahead. Right? You and I have talked about, AI. AI, of course, everyone's looking at, Walsh Group is formulating their AI policy. But you and I specifically talked about how Nasuni can be a powerful foundation for AgenTic AI for your engineers. So walk me through a little bit of our conversation about you have a new engineer that starts up and he's tasked with, designing a new water treatment plant. How would he access that today without AgenTic AI? How would he how would he start to look at lessons learned from previous projects? And what would that look like now if he could use AgenTic AI like Claude or Grok or Gemini and use our MCP to access the vast store of data that's contained in the unified file system. Mhmm. Historically, if we have an engineer who was working on, let's say, he or she built or was involved with building a a a a wastewater treatment plant somewhere, and, we we happen to there's a need for another one being built in a different area. He or she should still have that access or will still have that access to the first job, And we'll then be able to go back and, you know, go on our map network drive, access our the the previous job and be able to look through there. With as far as using a Genetec AI for that, we haven't gotten there yet. But I know that the functionality exists, with Mizuni that is gonna allow, integrations with Claude, Copilot, other AI engines out there that, is gonna, you know, instead of being a manual search, be able to do that that, that lookup for us to get that information significantly faster than doing it manually. Yeah. I mean, having done this ourselves before, our jobs in the past, I I have to imagine that if an engineer comes in and says, hey. Show me the lessons learned for all the wastewater treatment projects, and AgenTic AI pulls it up and gives a list of all those lessons learned, that has to be a lot more powerful because now you're able to to start to get more cost efficiencies, more improvements in design because that manual process well, there's two things, right? There's the manual process, having to look through all that. And, yeah, I had a colleague that used to joke about Hank. Hank was the guy who's been here for forty years, knows everything. We still need Hanks, but not as much as we used to because we can replace that with some of these intelligent tools that can gain some of that knowledge or not gain some of that knowledge, but help you locate some of that information more easily within a unified file system. Correct? Yeah. Do do the work out there for you and and and present the data to us, and then we can look at the trends and and, start looking at patterns or or, like you said earlier, look up lessons learned and kinda centralize that for us so it's not spread all over the place. We have a a concise list or concise, area where we can have all that information where it's easily more easily accessible. So, no. That's it's, we we have not tapped into it yet, but it is out there and, eager to see what that's gonna look like look like and see what the the the benefit we're gonna achieve from that. Yeah. Now as I said, looking ahead, you know, I think there's a lot of a lot of potential for the Walsh Group to improve cost efficiencies, improve engineering efficiencies, improve designs, you know, be by a being able to tap into that vast knowledge of project data that you've accumulated. Mhmm. The last thing I wanna touch on before we close out is, it it's something that's near and dear to pretty much everybody's heart, but ransomware, the striker attack, right, malicious deletion by a nation state. Yep. Does this keep you up at night? How does Nasuni play into this equation? Sure. You know, we we had a, a ransomware attack a number of years ago. Very fortunately, we were able to utilize Nasuni's kind of built in architecture and I'm gonna say their their their their ransomware proof, capabilities. And we were able to, at the time, go back a day before the ransomware attack occurred. Fortunately, we're able to we we were able to figure that out with the help of our end users at this location and completely minimized all ransomware, issues that would've that would've resulted from it. And, going forward now, I know that Nasuni has put a lot of time and effort into their ransomware protection package, and I've seen it firsthand. We do not employ it here, but I know that it is something that talks touches on it and looks at the at at minimizing the blast radius. So it can tell you exactly when the data is was compromised, exactly what files were compromised, and and a report as to, you know, what that what that's all gonna look like. So you can go back to the, you know, a few minutes before depending on your your your snap and and sync schedule. You You can go back to a few minutes before greatly minimizing your data loss, and minimizing the the blast radius of the effect of that. So, another just another example where, you know, Nasuni continues to add value to their their product. You know, overall, Nasuni for us, it's a product that just just works. Either even when updates come out, it's you know, we do a tiered approach here, but, you know, the the the the the quality control, the quality assurance departments are I'm sure, must have their hands in there. And and when we roll those out, our our edge appliances all just you know, they come online after after the update. So with that and the, you know, value add that Nasuni brings, like, in the ransomware protection and in Nasuni IQ, it certainly continues to make our job easier by giving us more visibility and telemetry into what's going on, whether it's from a, you know, ransomware attack. This is exactly what was what was was compromised, and this is exactly the point to where you need to go back. Or, hey. This is this is the folder. This folder was moved. It wasn't deleted. Here's the folder where here's the location where it went. All you gotta do is move it back. So, from a ransomware perspective, I think in an IT world, it it keeps all of us up at night partially. But, you know, having Nasuni in place as one of our our vendors and our partners, it's it's one less thing we have to be, it's one less thing that keeps us up at night. I'll say that. Okay. So before we move to closing advice to your peers in the industry, would it surprise you to know that Nasuni is the only data storage company that has zero trust architecture built into the foundation of the product from day one? No, it would not surprise me at all. Yes, we are a foundational pillar in the NIST Zero Trust architecture because of the way Nasuni was architected and designed. So, I mean, we talked a lot about a a lot about some really good topics. Mhmm. If you were sitting across from another AEC, IT, director or CIO or or professional, what would you tell them? You know, I it it's like I said earlier, it just works. It's it's one you know, we work as in most IT departments, you you work with a lot of vendors. The Zoom is one we don't really have to worry about. It it's a it's a product that just works. Our end users are able to access their data. If if we can rely on our end users for anything, we can rely on them to tell us when something is wrong. And we don't usually get a lot of, something is wrong with Nasuni. So it it's a product that that allows our end users to access their data safely and securely. And not only that, it's it's available, and they can access it really from anywhere. So it's it's it's one one thing we we don't have to worry about and, you know, my doctor tells me sleep is pretty important. So the fact that, this isn't keeping me up at night is, something that, is certainly, what we we like in our relationship with Nasuni. Yeah. And in our industry, the less you have to worry about, the happier our lives are in general. Right? Exactly. Exactly. Well, Rob, I think we're out of time, but I want to thank you for taking the time today to to speak with us. You had a lot of really good insight into not only your industry and the challenges you face, but how Nasuni can be an instrumental player in making your daily life in AEC that much simpler. Happy to help. Happy to help. Happy to help. Have a good one. Alright. Thanks, Scott. Have a good night.