From the slopes to the cloud to the podium

Olympic Athlete and Isle of Man’s Sportswoman of the Year, Zoe Gillings-Brier is set to save an estimated £15,000 a year using Transporter, Connected Data’s private cloud appliance. Getting feedback from her coaches is now eight times faster giving her an almost instant evaluation on her performance, with the added reassurance of the appliances’ security.

Despite being Great Britain’s No 1 Snowboard Cross champion, with seven World Cup podiums, three winter Olympic Games and many multi-national titles to her name, there is little funding for the sport in the UK. Finding ways to make and save money are key.

Zoe has her own travel and time to account for as well as those of her fitness coach who is based in the UK and her snowboarding coach who is in Canada. Zoe decided to limit the costs of her coaches’ flight and travel expenses by sending them videos from the slopes instead. Her coaches could then use an app called Coach’s Eye to comment on the videos, pausing or slowing them down, even circling on the screen to provide direction, advice and feedback.

But, the plan to use videos for long distance training was being hampered by a slow and expensive public cloud provider and Zoe had concerns about the privacy of her footage.

“I didn’t like the idea of my files being stored on an unknown server in the US somewhere, where I didn’t have control of it.” Explains Zoe, “ I thought, there must be something else, where you can own the hard drive, so I did some googling and came across the Transporter.”

The Transporter offers all the key benefits of a public cloud platform, without any of the privacy or security concerns. The appliance is privately owned so users have 100% total ownership and control over their data for a one-off fee. Zoe estimates that by not flying her coaches to her, she will save £15,000 a year. The money saved can be used to buy new equipment and prepare for the 2018 Olympics.

“Before using the Transporter there was a lot of back and forth of emails, between my coaches and I, as each one made edits. Basically, it was a big hassle.” Zoe explains. “With the Transporter, I don’t have to do any of that. I can tell my coach to look in a folder for a new video and that’s it. I can get almost instant feedback. What took an hour, now takes ten minutes.”

Zoe also uses the Transporter to helps sustain her online business projects. Business projects that ultimately help fund her snowboarding career. Zoe needs to share documents with colleagues from wherever she happens to be and the Transporter offers both secure file sync and share, but also access to large amounts of data without overloading her laptop’s hardrive.

“The Transporter is ideal for sharing large video files like Zoe is doing,” said Geoff Barrall, CEO of Connected data, “Its exciting to hear that a talented athlete, such as Zoe Gillings-Brier is finding the appliance such a benefit to her training and other businesses. No one wants their data falling into competitors’ hands, and with the public cloud there is always that risk. So, it’s a smart move by the Olympian, hopefully one that helps propel Zoe to even more success in 2018!”