From File Servers to AI-Powered Project Intelligence with Nasuni

About McKim & Creed

McKim & Creed is an employee-owned engineering and surveying firm with approximately 1,100 employees across 40 offices in ten states. The firm’s operations span civil engineering, water and wastewater management, building systems and geospatial services, requiring the management of over 100 terabytes of data.

The challenge

McKim & Creed needed to overcome data management and collaboration roadblocks.

Before adopting Nasuni, McKim & Creed faced several significant challenges with their data management and collaboration processes. When they started the Nasuni implementation, they had 26 offices spread across eight states, and each office maintained its own file server leading to inefficiencies and a lack of centralized control. The IT team monitored disk space and ran backups on 27 separate servers daily, which was highly time-consuming and prone to error. Also, restoring systems was limited to just a few daily options, often making it difficult to recover data quickly and efficiently.

McKim & Creed also struggled with collaboration. They needed to make sure that everyone could work on any project, anywhere, and at any time securely. Project files would often be copied and synched between offices. Still, there was no way to ensure everyone was working on the correct file version, leading to confusion and decreased productivity. McKim & Creed needed a scalable solution allowing users to access files from anywhere, anytime, without the high bandwidth and appliance costs associated with many other solutions. McKim & Creed also needed a way to protect its data from the growing ransomware threat and ensure business continuity in the face of potential threats.

How Nasuni helped McKim & Creed

The ability that Nasuni has to do the backup snapshots and its ability to do that kind of ransomware recovery, makes me as the IT director very comfortable in the evenings.

Charles Douglass, Director of IT

Nasuni enabled a streamlined migration.

McKim & Creed successfully migrated individual file servers to the Nasuni cloud in a phased process, shutting down old servers after syncing data.

Nasuni allowed McKim & Creed to improve its data management drastically.

Nasuni eliminated the need for daily disk space monitoring and server backups by providing a unified cloud backup system.

Seamless file sharing enhanced collaboration.

With global file locking and acceleration, teams could seamlessly share and access project files, ensuring a single source of truth. IT Director Charles Douglass said, “Our end users right now are getting increased productivity gains because if a file gets corrupted, they can restore to one that was 15 or 20 minutes ago, and we can do it very, very quickly.”

Restoring corrupt files leads to increased productivity.

Nasuni’s quick restoration of corrupted files (within minutes) reduced downtime and enhanced user efficiency.

Implementing Nasuni allowed for scalability and consolidation.

Nasuni centralized storage for large file types, such as CAD and image processing, and removed the need to expand disk capacity in individual offices.

Ransomware recovery provides peace of mind.

Nasuni’s backup snapshots and ransomware recovery capabilities were key to McKim & Creed’s business continuity strategy.

Nasuni is helping fuel AI innovation across the firm.

With project data centralized in Nasuni, McKim & Creed has a foundation to power AI-driven workflows, from drafting engineering reports to querying regulatory documents, all grounded in the firm’s own curated data.

Early Resilio signals in remote performance.

McKim & Creed are currently running Nasuni’s Resilio technology on a trial run, extending high-performance file access to users working outside the office. Remote Civil 3D engineers have already seen a 50% productivity improvement compared to using the VPN.

Unlocking Project Intelligence with AI Activate

We believe that Nasuni AI Activate can change the way we work with project data. We’ll be able to pull in all the information on specific projects inside of our Nasuni environment through the API and allow our AI tools to access all of it. Point to a project directory, generate a summary, get a project history, interact with everything in that folder. That’s the kind of value that Nasuni keeps delivering for us.

Charles Douglass, Director of IT

From centralized storage to AI-ready data.

McKim & Creed has built an internal AI platform, a suite of tools the team calls “the Barrel of Monkeys,” connected to Azure Foundry for flexible model selection. The tools are purpose-built for engineering and surveying workflows, covering everything from automated meeting summaries to first-draft engineering reports to regulatory document analysis. But to make these tools truly powerful, they need access to the firm’s decades of project data, and that’s where Nasuni AI Activate comes in.

With Nasuni AI Activate, McKim & Creed can connect its AI platform directly to the project directories stored in Nasuni, enabling users to point to any project and instantly generate summaries, pull histories, compare proposals, retrieve cost data, or locate technical specifications across the firm’s entire file index.

The use cases Douglass envisions are wide-ranging: answering “have we done this before?” queries about specific equipment or project types, running relationship summaries for client proposals, and pulling historical cost data for similar past work. Looking further ahead, McKim & Creed is evaluating plans to connect ERP, CRM, and HR systems through MCP servers alongside Nasuni, with Azure Foundry orchestrating queries across multiple knowledge bases.

Resilio: opening new frontiers for field teams.

Once we saw what Resilio could do for our remote designers, we started thinking bigger. Our hydrographic survey boats, our field crews, anywhere we have people generating or needing data outside the office. There are some really exciting applications here, and we’re definitely looking into how we can put them into action.

Charles Douglass, Director of IT

Beyond the office, McKim & Creed is exploring Nasuni Resilio for its most demanding field scenarios. The firm’s hydrographic surveying teams operate survey boats using multi-beam sonar, often relying on intermittent Starlink connections. Resilio’s ability to sync data from vessels over unreliable networks and get survey results up to cloud processing workstations quickly could eliminate the costly delays of sending boats back out for missed survey lines. Douglass sees the same potential for land-based survey crews, replacing manual USB transfers and OneDrive workarounds with direct sync into the Nasuni environment.

The Nasuni difference

Nasuni fit into that sweet spot of giving us an advanced technological solution at a price that we could afford that would fit our implementation and fit our overall architecture.

Charles Douglass, Director of IT

When McKim & Creed first evaluated Nasuni, they were looking for a way to consolidate 27 file servers and solve a collaboration problem. What they found was a platform that has grown alongside the firm for years, adapting as new challenges emerged. Centralized storage replaced the overhead of managing individual servers. Global file locking and acceleration gave distributed teams a single source of truth. Ransomware recovery and continuous snapshots provided a level of data protection that the previous infrastructure simply could not offer.

Now, with AI Activate and Resilio, that same platform is enabling capabilities that were not part of the original conversation: AI-powered project intelligence built on decades of engineering data, and high-performance file access for remote designers and offshore survey crews. For a firm managing over 100 terabytes across 40 offices, the ability to keep evolving on a single platform, rather than layering on new point solutions, has been a meaningful advantage.