Case Study: Woodard & Curran achieves $350,000 annual savings and LAN-speed collaboration with Microsoft Azure

Engineering firm saves $350,000 a year with hybrid cloud storage

Woodard & Curran, a US environmental engineering firm with 900 employees across 27 offices, was hampered by isolated on‑prem NetApp NAS islands, SnapMirror replication, an MPLS WAN and Riverbed accelerators. Large unstructured files opened slowly across offices, making collaboration difficult—teams often had to travel between locations or suffer long delays to access project data.

The firm deployed Panzura Hybrid Cloud Controllers connected to Microsoft Azure, migrating site‑by‑site over four months to a “hot edge, cold core” architecture that keeps active data local and stores cold data in Azure. The change delivered LAN‑speed access for all users, eliminated backup/DR/archiving hardware and MPLS, doubled Internet speed at half the price, and saved about $350,000 annually ($120k in hardware refresh costs and $225k in connectivity). Travel costs fell 7%, seven acquired offices were integrated in one week, and security and scalability improved via Panzura encryption and Azure storage.

Woodard and Curran

Kenneth Danila

Director of Information Systems