Rockbridge: Securing Investment Data

The Challenge

Rockbridge is a private equity firm that makes investments for acquisition, development, repositioning, and refinance or recapitalization for the hospitality industry. They are dedicated to securing their investors’ confidential financial information and personally identifiable information (PII) companywide. Their PII includes typical data like Social Security Numbers, as well as data like fingerprints, which are commonly used for hotel access control and liquor licensing.

Previously, the Rockbridge IT Team relied on labor-intensive internal algorithms to classify company data. The algorithms were time consuming to run and offered little-to-no auditing capabilities. Ensuring useful results required a significant amount of manual work.

The team needed a better way to support their regulatory compliance efforts. They also needed visibility into how sensitive content was shared and permissioned. They knew employees used Dropbox to send and share files with external parties, but had little visibility into what was shared. Migrating company content from an in-house server to Egnyte helped consolidate data in the cloud. However, they still needed insight into where specific types of data were stored and how they were moved or shared.

The Solution

Streamlined Content Classification Increases Productivity

Rockbridge staff experienced significant and immediate time savings. Iterative scanning, focused only on changed data, coupled with more accurate detection, cut time spent generating and reviewing compliance reports from 40 hours a week to 10 hours a week. Time previously spent identifying issues could now be spent proactively preventing or fixing them.

Increased Visibility Leads to Better Control

The team was surprised to find how much data employees shared through public links and how often they moved files between folders. Egnyte now alerts them when employees share sensitive data via public links and when files are moved to inappropriate folders. They can take immediate action to disable links and move files to the correct location, automatically leaving a notification — another time saver.

Egnyte's Secure & Govern interface allows the team to easily navigate their cloud repository and view which individuals and groups have access to specific files and folders, as well as identify folders containing sensitive data or associated issues. This is a big improvement over the manual spreadsheet the team used to maintain.

As a SaaS solution, Egnyte frequently adds new features and functionality. The ability to detect ransomware and unusual file downloads have been especially welcomed. Once alerted to the presence of ransomware, the team can isolate the infected user and stop the infection. The ability to detect employees downloading an unusual volume of files also enabled the team to positively respond to an SEC request.

The Results

Rockbridge has successfully streamlined their compliance monitoring and reporting capabilities. They now take swift action to address compliance and process issues, enforce best practices, and protect against insider and outsider threats.

The company has also gained visibility into and control over where sensitive data resides across the organization, how it is shared, and who can access it. Egnyte has helped Rockbridge improve productivity, security, and overall content governance.