National Portrait Gallery keeps media workflows fast while archiving for the long term with Vawlt.

Übersicht 

The National Portrait Gallery (NPG) needed to preserve a growing digital archive of photos and video without slowing editors or reshaping day-to-day workflows.

With Vawlt Supercloud presented as a “Virtual NAS”, NPG gained elastic, long-term storage with local-like performance, providing seamless access to assets for creative teams.

“It’s always a pleasure to work with institutions like the National Portrait Gallery, true leaders in their field and guardians of cultural heritage. Their success reflects what we aim for at Vawlt: making data resilience and sovereignty simple, secure, and efficient — so that organizations can focus on their mission, not their infrastructure.” — Ricardo Mendes, CEO, Vawlt Technologies

“We are thrilled at how Vawlt is a one stop all for our data access and storage needs. We are impressed with the zero-knowledge end-to-end encryption, so only the data owner has access to the file contents.  The clever deployment of distributing this encrypted data enables resilience; the original data can be reconstructed even if some providers experience an outage, data loss, or corruption. Client-side cryptographic signing and erasure coding ensure data cannot be altered or corrupted without detection. These measures ensure long-term data availability and integrity, a crucial aspect of retention policies. All without the team needing to adjust their workflow, they access and work on Vawlt stored assets as if on the local server.“— Katy Dent, Senior Digital Manager, National Portrait Gallery

The Challenge

NPG relied on a local file server with SMB shares for its media assets. Since reopening in 2023, the National Portrait Gallery needed to explore a Cloud solution for users to both work on and archive the increasing number of media assets, that meet National retention and file integrity policies. 

Traditional cloud storage options introduced friction: files had to be downloaded locally before editing, breaking established workflows and complicating version control. NPG needed a way to scale to the cloud without sacrificing performance or usability for its editors.

 

Why Vawlt?

NPG needed cloud scale without a cloud experience for users. They needed one unified environment where:

• Hot files remained responsive and easily accessible.
• Cold data could be retained securely for the long term.
• The solution integrated transparently with existing SMB workflows.

Vawlt delivered exactly that:

• Virtual NAS experience: Presented as a local file system, Vawlt appears as a standard network drive to users.
• Local cache for hot media: Frequently accessed assets are stored locally for immediate performance.
• Long-term, scalable retention: A virtually limitless archive with immutability and redundancy built in.
• User transparency: No retraining, no reconfiguration—editors simply kept working as before.

The Solution

Vawlt was deployed as a file-system-based Virtual NAS on a local server, exposing a single SMB share to users.

A local cache holds the hottest assets, such as recent shoots and in-flight edits, while the entire content library is stored durably in Vawlt Supercloud. All data is automatically encrypted, dispersed, and replicated across multiple cloud providers for long-term retention and resiliency.

Editors continue to open, edit, and save files directly via the mapped drive, with Vawlt handling all background caching and cloud placement seamlessly.

No new hardware was required,Vawlt utilized NPG’s existing local storage for caching.

The Result? Users kept the SMB workflow, gained virtually bottomless storage, and maintained consistent local-like performance without downloading files first.

 

Outcomes & Benefits

• Local-like performance for media work: Editors reported parity with previous on-prem NAS, including smooth timeline scrubbing for video.
• Unified namespace: No split between on-prem and cloud tiers. All assets live in one place and remain accessible at all times.
• Long-term retention built in: Archive growth no longer forces forklift upgrades or periodic clean-ups.
• Lower operational overhead: NPG retired legacy NAS servers and kept only a small local cache, which ran on existing storage. This reduced maintenance, power, and refresh spend.
• Elastic capacity on demand: Storage expands instantly with projects and ingest peaks, with no procurement cycles.
• Workflow continuity: No new tools for creatives and no manual downloads required.

Resilience and Data Security

• Multi-cloud geo replication with a single cloud cost profile: Vawlt disperses data across multiple independent clouds and regions using policy-driven placement and efficient redundancy. This provides the continuity benefits of multi-cloud without paying for multiple complete copies across clouds.
• Continuous access during provider or region incidents: If one provider or region is degraded, users keep working from the same mapped drive. Reads are served from healthy locations and background healing restores full protection when the affected location recovers. No failover playbooks are required for end users.
• No vendor lock-in at the storage layer: Data is distributed across clouds under one namespace. Placement policies can be adjusted over time, reducing the risk of being tied to a single provider.
• Zero-knowledge encryption by design: Files are encrypted on the client side before leaving the environment. Encryption keys remain under NPG control and never leave their possession. Vawlt cannot see or decrypt customer data, and neither can the underlying cloud providers.
• End-to-end protection: Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Access is controlled through existing identity and permissions on the SMB share and through Vawlt policies.
• Retention and integrity: Policy-driven retention ensures the digital archive is preserved for the long term, while the dispersed layout guards against silent corruption by allowing verification and self-healing.

Conclusion

With Vawlt, the National Portrait Gallery modernized its storage strategy, protecting priceless digital media while keeping creative workflows fast, familiar, and resilient.

Now, the Gallery benefits from virtually unlimited storage capacity, ransomware-proof protectionund seamless hybrid-cloud scalability, without the cost or complexity of expanding legacy infrastructure.

 

Ready to modernize your storage strategy and protect your data in a seamless way?

Let’s talk about a quick pilot or tailored demo for your environment.

👉 Book a demo  or Contact us: sales@vawlt.io