Transform IT With File-sharing Services For the Future

As more and more businesses were forced to move to the cloud with the COVID-19 crisis, content and data have proliferated across devices, users, apps, and locations as a result of the new, mass work-from-anywhere reality. This brought a growing set of challenges to prevent data silos and content sprawl while remaining compliant with data regulations and governance.

Many businesses weathered the disruption with ad-hoc, cobbled-together solutions that tested the limits of their organizational capacity and infrastructure. While offices are beginning to open and some semblance of normality has returned, there is still a need to prepare for any future challenges and create intentional strategies to support the future of work more efficiently.

Most of today’s organizations rely on a legacy of expensive, cumbersome infrastructure to hold their growing content needs together. But executives around the world are being forced to rethink their vision for content management before they begin losing sensitive data, or the cost of scaling hardware becomes too much to bear. To maximize efficiencies and take full advantage of the latest cloud technologies, an effective, scalable, and well-laid out plan and roadmap are necessary.

‍What are the typical pain points?

‍Many companies have a content infrastructure designed specifically to work with their business. Just ripping and replacing hardware systems is not only costly but may not serve their unique requirements.

File servers, backup, and archival solutions will continue to need expensive maintenance and upgrades, and the challenge of building disaster recovery options with complex infrastructure will only become more difficult. The clear goal is to somehow reduce hardware and software updates and minimize maintenance costs, without limiting user productivity.

No easy feat.

With traditional infrastructure, smooth collaboration is a struggle when a workforce becomes dispersed. Managing the impact of large files on personal wifi networks at home and maintaining performance at the office is a drain on everyone’s productivity. Throw on top of that the added burden on the IT help desk as employees try to configure their VPN, and it quickly becomes a situation where everyone is busy, but no one is getting anything done to move the business forward.

In that situation, employees begin looking for workarounds to make their work more efficient, which often leads to the use of unapproved, non-compliant shadow IT tools that increase exposure to data breaches, ransomware, and insider threats. Without visibility and control, it’s difficult to know if end users are following security best practices or potentially putting the company in violation of industry or global data regulations.

‍How is this manifesting in IT’s mandates?

‍IT’s goals are often similar at the highest level: reduce complexity and costs while maintaining or increasing ROI and user productivity. As a result, big initiatives like “infrastructure modernization” have fast become an important concept.

The term infrastructure modernization rose from the expensive struggle businesses face maintaining, upgrading, and scaling their digital content infrastructure requirements.

This data center hardware—storage servers, network devices, operating systems, and middleware—that allow companies to store, protect, and access content is complex and expensive to manage, update, and expand.

When it comes to modernizing content infrastructure, some companies simply choose to replace their entire framework with a cloud-based system. However, for many businesses, that’s not always a practical choice: legacy hardware investments must be preserved and interoperability and continuity maintained.

It’s why we decided to build Egnyte as a complete hybrid platform, designed to modernize all infrastructures while protecting existing investments and maximizing efficiency. Governance, security, and compliance are built right in, enabling companies to manage data and content no matter where it sits—whether it’s in Egnyte, Microsoft 365, OneDrive, SharePoint, Google Cloud, AWS, Azure or myriad other places. With Egnyte, it becomes easy to eliminate legacy hardware and software costs while also removing the need for VPN and providing users with the same seamless drive letter experience they’re used to, ultimately fueling user productivity as well.

Egnyte has become the backbone of thousands of successful IT teams. To learn more, visit egnyte.com

Photo by Eggy Febryano on Unsplash