Lush deploys Storage Made Easy solution

Cosmetics retailer Lush is turning to Storage Made Easy’s Enterprise File Share and Sync solution with data stored on OpenStack Swift to help improve its global reach.


Lush ran an initial two month trial with 50 people prior to moving forward with the Storage Made Easy solution. They subsequently rolled out the solution in stages, by department, first to 150 people and then on to 300 people, and then again on to 500 people.

“Lush expects to reach more than 1,000 users by the time the solution is fully rolled out," said Jim Liddle, Storage Made Easy CEO.

Lush is a brand-conscious company and the SME solution has been custom branded by Lush as the ‘Lush Cloud.’ The level of branding includes the Storage Made Easy Mac and Windows desktop tools, which are also custom-branded for Lush. SME makes it very easy for companies to brand the software by providing easy branding configuration, according Storage Made Easy.

The SME cloud file server solution is hosted in the U.K. on Lush's preferred service provider infrastructure, Memset, which also provides the back-end data store, Memset Object Storage, a customized version of OpenStack Swift.

"We chose the SME product because of the flexibility the solution offers. It has been very easy to manage large numbers of users and file structures from all areas of the business in more than 50 countries,” Richy Baxter-Freeman from Lush international support said. “Our staff can access data on the go through their mobile devices, through a standard Web browser, or directly using the desktop integration functions. The solution is also flexible in the sense that we are able to manage multiple data sources and most importantly keep our data sources and management of these separate, meaning we can easily move data sources if necessary."

Storage Made Easy unifies files from disparate sources that could be on-cloud or onsite, and it provides various control points for that data including full file life-cycle audit and remote file encryption for protection against potential data snooping.