Calvary Church of Los Gatos Turns to Connected Data Transporter

Connected Data, Inc. announced that Calvary Church of Los Gatos, CA has deployed its Transporter for Business, private cloud storage appliance, and enjoys improved management efficiency, as well as increase in performance.

Moreover, since dropping its previous solution – Dropbox – Calvary Church has reduced its file-sharing budget by avoiding the costs it was spending on recurring fees. Sunday school and church events go more smoothly and the church is prepared for future expansion with a data management solution that will grow with its needs.

The church is an active worship organization with a congregation of nearly 1,500 members. Supported by over 40 staff and volunteers, it is focused on ways to leverage technologies that increase efficiency and engagement from its members, while also maintaining a reasonable budget.

To support church operations, numerous documents, photos and videos need to be regularly shared between Calvary’s staff and volunteers. Many of these users work remotely and this creates challenges in regards to accessing and sharing files that are stored on the local file server. Initially, Calvary decided to implement Dropbox to support remote access and sharing, but almost experienced issues as users’ computers ran out of space.

“Our staff and volunteers need to be able to access our entire inventory of photos and videos,” said Mark Yoder, IT administrator, Calvary Church. “Unfortunately Dropbox immediately started to fill-up client HDDs with video due to its syncing feature.“

Yoder attempted to work around the issue by having users access files via Dropbox’s web interface, but this introduced other challenges.

“Our users experienced difficulty and frustration trying to access Dropbox file via their web interface. It just wasn’t as intuitive as accessing folders right on the computer,” he explained.

In addition to user frustration, Yoder also ran into challenges ensuring the data stored on Dropbox was always accessible and properly protected from disaster. An Internet outage last year made files stored on Dropbox inaccessible, highlighting the fact that there was no easy way to backup files stored there.

“Ultimately, we could never move 100% to Dropbox due to its inability to integrate with our backup infrastructure. We needed a better solution,” continued Yoder.

Calvary Church heard about Connected Data Transporter from one of its members and initially tried the consumer solution. The organization then participated in the Transporter for Business beta program, and it was then that the church realized how intuitive and efficient it is to use and manage.

“Transporter has improved our workflow dramatically. Our users now have access to remote files right from the Mac Finder utility, so it’s much more intuitive,” said Yoder. “There have also been some significant performance benefits. Transporter uploads files over our fast local network versus uploading over the Internet. This allows us to get the recorded services delivered the next morning without any issues.“

“With Transporter for Business, organizations like Calvary Church are better able to simply support the work processes that touch multiple parts of their operations, without the added cost, complexity and risk of public file sharing services like Dropbox,” said Jim Sherhart, VP marketing, Connected Data. “This means that they can easily support their file sharing needs without extra burden on users or IT staff, while also enjoying measurable improvements across management efficiency, flexibility and performance, not to mention an overall decrease in costs.“

Calvary Church has migrated over 3TB of data to Transporter and was able to cancel its Dropbox business account, saving costs and simplifying management. The organization is deploying Transporter Sync’s at its staff and volunteer’s homes to provide fast, local copies and offsite protection thanks to Transporter’s integrated replication. Because Transporter integrates directly with their backup infrastructure, Yoder plans to migrate an additional 3TB of data from the legacy file server to Transporter so they can decommission the file server and the VPN to drive even further cost savings.