The Trigger
The local Australian arm of a large European printing company had a file-sharing problem that was quietly costing them sales. Their quoting process depended on Excel spreadsheets shared across a geographically distributed sales force — and the legacy VPN holding it together was slow, unreliable, and increasingly difficult to manage. The business knew it needed a better solution. What it didn’t know was that the solution they were about to implement would still be running more than a decade later, long after the platforms that seemed like the obvious alternatives had come and gone.
The Challenge
With sales teams spread across Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane, the business needed a way to keep quoting files current, accessible, and accurate — regardless of where a sales rep was working. The legacy VPN created friction at every point: slow transfers, version conflicts, and access problems on the road. Productivity was suffering, and the risk of a rep quoting from an outdated file was a real commercial exposure. At the same time, the company was acutely aware of the risks of handing sensitive commercial data to third-party cloud platforms — in 2012, that instinct was ahead of the market.
The Solution
PRETERION designed and deployed a private cloud solution built on Synology NAS devices, installed at each of the three branch locations. The devices synchronised continuously across sites, ensuring every location always had a complete, current copy of the data. Smart user permissions — managed by group rather than individual — meant that staff at each location accessed only what was relevant to them, without complex access requests or IT intervention.
Combined with mobile and laptop applications, the sales force could work on live files from anywhere: in a client meeting, between offices, or from home. For the first time, the business had a file infrastructure that matched how its people actually worked.
The solution worked so well that the European parent company adopted it and deployed it globally.
Before / After
Before PRETERION:
- Legacy VPN causing slow transfers, version conflicts, and access failures in the field
- Sales reps regularly quoting from outdated files — a direct commercial risk
- No resilience across sites — a single point of failure for critical commercial data
- IT team managing access on a per-user basis with no scalable permission structure
After PRETERION:
- Seamless file access from any device, at any location, online or offline
- Three synchronised NAS devices across Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane — full redundancy
- Group-based permissions rolled out in days, self-managing from that point forward
- Solution adopted by the European parent company and deployed globally
- 10+ years of continuous operation with no platform migration required
Benefits
- Eliminated quoting errors caused by version conflicts across the sales force
- Full data redundancy across three cities — loss of any single site causes zero disruption
- Total cost of ownership significantly lower than SaaS alternatives over a 10-year horizon — NAS hardware maintained properly routinely exceeds a decade of service life
- Sensitive commercial data remained on infrastructure the business owned and controlled — no third-party cloud exposure
- When the parent company later adopted Office 365, the NAS solution ran alongside it without conflict — and when the business began moving away from Office 365, there was nothing to migrate in the file space
Client Quote
“We evaluated the cloud platforms everyone was talking about at the time and decided against them. What PRETERION built for us was faster, cheaper to run, and completely ours. Thirteen years later, that decision still looks right.”
— General Manager, printing and manufacturing business, Sydney
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