Five reasons LucidLink is right for your business

If you work anywhere in the creative industries, you’ve probably heard of LucidLink. This groundbreaking virtual NAS is already popular in the media sector, and bagged ‘best in show awards’ at multiple major expos this year. But did you know that you don’t have to be handling media files for LucidLink to be a worthwhile investment?

By Liz Sunter November 15, 2022

LucidLink’s cloud-based NAS file storage solution streamlines remote working by giving remote and hybrid teams instant access to the files they’re collaborating in. Working in LucidLink storage feels like working on a local drive because LucidLink uses intelligent streaming and metadata management to ensure they’re not left waiting for files to sync or download. At the same time, global file locking functionality serialises access to material and simplifies version control.

Let’s dig further in to how this reliable, low-delay, collaboration-friendly system can improve your remote and distributed workflows, whatever files you’re working with…

1.     Protect yourself from ransomware with instant backup and retrieval.

To the horror of our engineering team, 42% of medium-sized businesses and 30% of large ones have no offsite backup strategy. Because LucidLink is hosted in the cloud, syncing your data to it automatically gives you an offsite copy, and the lack of egress fees means that restoring data from LucidLink is more affordable that it would be from many other cloud storage providers.

However, LucidLink does more than provide a convenient offsite data depositary.

You can take snapshots of any given filespace to quickly back up your data, then restore to them with just a couple of clicks. It makes getting back to work after a user error, power outage or hardware failure incredibly quick and easy. System admins can even schedule snapshots on an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or annual basis.

But there’s more. Because these snapshots are read-only, they’ll remain unaffected if you’re ever the victim of a ransomware attack. Instead of paying to get access to your data, which may be corrupt or play host to further malware, you can restore from an immutable snapshot and be sure that your project or filespace will be just as you left it, without any nasty surprises.

2.     Increase uptime by eliminating download and sync.

Anyone who has tried to coordinate a remote project will tell you that uploading, downloading and syncing files is a time-consuming challenge. Make it too easy and you’ll run up your data costs and end up with no authoritative version of an asset. Make it too difficult and you reduce productivity and collaboration. And no matter what policies you decide on, your network (and remote workers’ home WiFi) will have something to say about it.

To mitigate this, LucidLink allows users to read and write directly in the cloud, with data streamed to and from your central cloud storage on demand and in real time. Lucidlink only caches the most frequently-used bits of data on end user machines, not entire files, so no matter how hard your team work, their computers’ performance won’t suffer. And if you use the cloud storage LucidLink provides, all of this occurs with no egress fees, making the entire process simple and affordable.

3.     Enable real time collaboration - securely.

LucidLink want your team to be able to collaborate – that’s why filespaces can support hundreds of users and deliver multiple simultaneous streams. But they also want you to rest assured that your data is secure.

That’s why all data is encrypted at AES 256 in flight and at rest and each filespace has its own encryption key. Not only does this protect you from man in the middle attacks, it ensures that no-one – whether a legitimate user or a malicious actor – can see files their login doesn’t entitle them to, or encrypt a filespace to which they do not have access.

That’s not to say you can’t give teams autonomy. LucidLink admins can give users read or read/write access to a filespace or assign specific user groups to specific folders and spaces, so that they can access their own project but no-one else’s.

4.     Engage global file locking to safeguard version control.

LucidLink’s global file locking gives applications the native support required for serializing access across multiple users (ie only letting one person edit shared resources at once) so teams can collaborate on shared projects, in the cloud, from any location, without undoing each other’s work.

And if you’re working in Revit, collaborating on a shared Autodesk Revit model can now work seamlessly as if they are collocated, without sacrificing performance. Still think this is just for media teams?

5.     Shift your storage budget to an opex model

Whether you bring your own storage or want a plan with Wasabi or IBM cloud included, LucidLink is priced per terabyte, per month, has no egress fees, and is available in three tiers based on the functionality you need.

That makes it ideal for any company looking to stay agile and avoid the one-off costs and long-term investment of a hardware NAS – regardless of sector. If you want to improve your team’s efficiency and collaboration while also increasing your firm’s ability to flex and adapt based on demand, LucidLink is the obvious choice for your shared storage needs.

Of course, it also comes with our stellar support 

As the only LucidLink partner in the UK, we work closely with them to deploy their unique SaaS solution into complex environments. Whether you want to use LucidLink as part of your cloud migration strategy, are looking to unify existing cloud volumes or are using LucidLink to streamline remote collaboration, our team have the expertise and experience you need. Learn how we helped connect global PR agency Team Lewis.

Want to hear more about the services and products we offer to creative teams? Call 03332 400 888, email sales@Jigsaw24.com or pop your details in the form below.