In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, time is of the essence. We crave efficiency, speed, and seamless workflow experiences.
From our tests on a 220MB SolidWorks file with 154 components, we found the following file open times.
The tests were executed with consumer-grade internet, approximately 200Mb/s down, 20Mb/s up.
Nothing beats opening a file from your local hard drive. This works well for the lone operator who doesn’t have to share any data until the project is completed and for whom version management is not an issue.
Second best file open times come from fetching the file from the Kenesto cache located on a local hard drive. It takes just a little longer to load than the local file because the Kenesto Drive has to check to see that the local cached version of the file is the very latest version, i.e the single source of truth. This ensures that no one else has opened the file for editing. All this checking requires calls to the cloud server, and it takes a little time to verify the file meta data. Note that the file gets stored in the Kenesto Drive cache upon the first load from the Kenesto Cloud.
Third fastest is loading the file from a network attached storage device or some other computer on the local area network. This is the way we used to work when we all shared an office and a LAN was our primary communication solution. However, this doesn’t work for remote employees and there are often security and backup tradeoffs.
The first time you open a file from the Kenesto Cloud and save it to the Kenesto cache takes the longest time of all. Typically, this is constrained by your internet connection speed. However, once loaded into your Kenesto cache, open times are comparable to local hard drive open times.
What do you get for your time waiting for the first load from the Kenesto Cloud?
- Automatic or semi-automatic file locking. Say good-bye to overwriting your colleague’s work accidentally. Kenesto also lets you limit access to your data. Give some users read-only privileges, for example.
- Automatic versioning – Kenesto saves every version of every file in perpetuity. We’ve been at this for nearly a decade.
- Safety and security – all your data lives encrypted on Amazon S3 servers. Amazon is awfully good at security and backup. Even if one of your employees goes rogue and deletes everything, we’ve got you covered.
If you’re a single-person organization with no collaboration needs, stay with your local C: Drive and find a backup solution you can live with. But if you’ve got a team of engineers who need to share data safely and securely, give Kenesto a try.