When two companies as synergistic as Box and DryvIQ get together to help non-profit organizations help make the world a better place, only good things can happen. Box recently established Box.org, a program designed to provide its cloud services to nonprofit organizations across the country at a highly discounted cost. Likewise, the DryvIQ platform file synchronization technology is mirroring those discounts. Both companies dedicate themselves to helping these groups gain a higher level of data access and collaborative ability.
Customer Profile
Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) is an organization that addresses global poverty through research and translating evidence to action. Its research studies investigate solutions for effective agriculture, education, health, finance, governance, social protection, and post-conflict recovery for example. Headquartered in New Haven, CT, the IPA supports work in 17 countries, where it routinely consults with governments, foundations, and non-governmental organizations. Since its founding, the results of IPA’s research have improved the lives of over 50 million people around the world.
Business Drivers
Performing the research and outreach IPA does around the world depends on connectivity: to people, data, and process. Whether it’s with researchers collecting data on the ground in an African village or arranging the analysis of these data across numerous sites, the process requires an enormous amount of data sharing and collaboration. IPA’s mission certainly relies on policymakers, academics, social action organizations, and funding sources scattered across the globe. Its business model depends on centralized oversight and control as well as consistent, two-way access to information amongst all of these stakeholders.
The Challenge: Global Box to SharePoint Collaboration
IPA’s challenges lie in orchestrating the high level of collaboration required for their success across a multi-national landscape that has inconsistent access to technology and internet connectivity, and where various partners may employ different networking methods. Niall Keleher is IPA’s Senior Director, Research Methods and Knowledge Management, and is in charge of the organization’s approach to research data collection. Niall explained that until recently, IPA had relied on a SharePoint infrastructure, and e-mail facilitated most data sharing and distribution “We had to make a serious change to enable better collaboration,” explained Niall. “We completely transitioned from a SharePoint environment to Box because we think it offers the best, most efficient way we can securely store, access, and collaborate with our data. DryvIQ enables IPA to retain the connection with SharePoint in order to permit collaboration with our partner organization.”
“These were major challenges.”
Niall continued, “The challenge was to be able to sync with a variety of different data infrastructures and cloud services. This requires a lot of complex data handshaking and translation between systems,” Niall explained. “Also, the issue of inconsistent, part-time or low-speed Internet access out in the field was huge. If a file transfer to or from Box was interrupted as often happens at remote field offices, it would require starting that transmission over. Sometimes just the size of a file is the issue. For example, a 50 or 100GB data set can simply outstrip a day’s data access time. These were major challenges.”
The Solution
Utilizing DryvIQ’s file synchronization software together with Box cloud services IPA was able to directly address these issues. “The combination of Box and DryvIQ gave us the ubiquitous access we had been looking for via the cloud but with the ability to centrally control access, all while seamlessly integrating with a wide variety of existing partner and collaborator storage systems,” explained Niall. “For example, one of our main partners utilizes a SharePoint infrastructure while many others leverage a variety of other storage platforms. These multi-platform use-cases present complex translation challenges.”
“DryvIQ completely handles these issues totally in the background,” explained Niall. “In addition, DryvIQ helped address the problems associated with inconsistent and slow speed Internet access. When a line is dropped, DryvIQ waits for service to come back online then picks up sync transfers right where they left off. This alone has solved a critical problem for us.”
The Results
The combination of Box and DryvIQ provided a cloud distribution strategy that helps IPA accomplish its goals. “It works flawlessly and is totally transparent to people in the field. All they know is that they have ready access to the data they need, even in challenging environments,” commented Niall. “Together, Box and DryvIQ enable us to truly collaborate globally,” he said. “We also see this helping us long-term as there are myriad use-cases that are applicable for DryvIQ.”
Working with DryvIQ
Niall described working with DryvIQ to get the software up and running was a great experience. “The DryvIQ team was incredibly helpful through the entire process,” said Niall. “They were amazingly responsive and put in a lot of effort and helped us at every turn, from testing through implementation. The software itself does exactly what it’s supposed to do. We couldn’t be more pleased.”