How Egnyte and Microsoft Tackle Content Protection for Microsoft Teams

I sometimes wish someone with gravitas had once said, “There is no content without security.” That would have looked good coming from Churchill or Lincoln. But their lack of foresight about content services doesn’t diminish a very important fact, one that carries its own brand of gravitas: the importance of security and governance for a company’s critical data. Content is data in “human readable” form. It represents the largest source of data growth for modern businesses, and the toughest to manage and control. Whether it’s documents, images, videos, schematics, or 3-D renderings, humans, not machines, are the ultimate end users of all this content, and that creates enormous value but also risk. And, unlike structured databases, unstructured information must be first structured in order to understand what data is sensitive and who should (or should not) have access to it. The Egnyte Platform was architected to place security closest to the source of risk: enterprise content and the humans that interact with it. It weaves data security into every layer of enterprise file sharing with unusual user behavior detection to deter insider threats and compromised accounts, as well as signature-based and zero-day ransomware detection. With our recent integration with Microsoft Teams, Egnyte applies that same security and governance across the broad array of Microsoft productivity apps that enable workers with chat, integrated meetings, voice, Microsoft 365, and a variety of third-party tools.The significance of this is best understood in the context of volume. First, consider that Microsoft Teams now has 75 million daily active users. All those users sit in front of a vast number of ways to create content, share it, change it, and store it. Every day, those users make decisions that impact the future of their business by being able to access relevant data. That’s a major boon for productivity. It’s a major bummer if it falls into the wrong hands.No one has to approve a spreadsheet that is created by a CFO, shared among her team, and then stored in the cloud. That’s happening all day long, and users barely have to think about the sensitivity of their data; their goal is to put it to use. But if that spreadsheet isn’t protected, it could be accessed via a ransomware attack and do a great deal of harm. The risk is too great, so content needs protection and governance so IT teams have visibility into the content they have, how it’s being accessed and used, and to detect behavioral anomalies.Egnyte’s platform applies smart content security and governance to Microsoft Teams to minimize the risk of internal and external threats to content by weaving content intelligence and data governance into every layer of the file sharing and collaboration architecture. In Egnyte, user authentication via two-step verification and encryption of data and content—both in transit and at rest—help secure the content environment at a foundational level. The Platform gives granular sub-folder permissions in addition to admin-level policies and continuous monitoring to ensure that only the right people have access to the right content. It does it like this:

1. Limits the exposure of your business data

Egnyte applies machine learning to the task of identifying and safeguards your most critical content by detecting insider/outsider threats, compliance violations, and mitigating them across the Microsoft ecosystem, including data in Azure.

2. Provides visibility into content in all repositories

IT admins have the ability to monitor files containing personal data across multiple data repositories. Whether it’s Egnyte, Windows File Servers, SharePoint, SharePoint Online and/or OneDrive for Business, you have real-time risk assessment and alerts to help you take corrective action before your business is impacted.

3. Delivers compliance coverage of GDPR and other regulatory requirements

Egnyte is a simple SaaS solution that can be turned on in a matter of minutes, not days or weeks, and that can help you meet your compliance requirements quickly without additional hardware infrastructure or special IT skills.This is all especially important as more workers operate remotely. Data security is less centralized and less tied to physical infrastructure, which will require more focus on user behavior and controlling how sensitive data moves through the system. Egnyte, working with Microsoft Teams, is an intelligence-driven approach to mitigating insider threats is built for the cloud-first world, applying smart controls closest to the content and the users that rely on it.Photo by Clint Adair on Unsplash