In order to address the French Ministry of Armed Forces’ need to share files and work collaboratively, the DIRISI deployed the Oodrive Work solution developed by oodrive, a leader in confidential content management in Europe. Oodrive Work provides a file storage and sharing system without size limits. Against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has led to widespread remote working, Oodrive Work is a major asset for ensuring service continuity. It has been widely adopted, a trend which has accelerated since the start of the pandemic. As of the end of 2020, the number of licenses had increased from 4,000 to 20,000.
A solution to support the DIRISI in its operations
Lieutenant General and DIRISI Central Director, Jean-Marc Latapy, commented: “With the Oodrive Work solution, oodrive supports the DIRISI in providing our forces and our employees with high-performing digital services. This allows our team to work on the move in the simplest and smoothest way possible.”
This collaboration began in 2014. At the time, the DIRISI sought to roll out a robust file sharing solution for its secure internal network.
A COVID-accelerated rollout
The Oodrive Work service was first launched in early 2019 and was initially made available to a limited number of staff members —1,800 out of more than 250,000 employees of the French Ministry of Armed Forces.
Over the course of 2020, the DIRISI reviewed the feasibility of increasing access and implementing the service on a larger scale. By early 2020, the infrastructure was ready, fully stable, and accessible to all employees. The project was named Défense Drive.
Against the background of the Covid-19 pandemic, Défense Drive quickly proved its usefulness. The solution, which is accessible on-the-go and which can be used to store and share all types of files via a link, was very quickly adopted. The solution saw exponential growth, with demand for licenses up from 4,000 users to 20,000 by the end of 2020.
An agile rollout
Today the solution meets all user expectations and has even been expanded. On-site staff use the service as a backup solution for photos and videos on their smartphones while others use it to synchronize workstation folders to the Défense Drive storage system.
The Défense Drive project benefitted from agile management and dedicated and proactive support from oodrive’s teams who devised an approach that takes user needs into account while allowing the DIRISI to move forward as quickly as possible with the rollout.
