Stacking Egnyte Up Against The Latest FSS Industry Report Findings

Corporate IT teams continually face the strain of ensuring that the tools they use satisfy their enterprise data protection requirements and provide appropriate control over business content. Recent industry reports drilling into the perceived shortcomings of these tools have only exacerbated this tension. To help offer some peace of mind, let me dive into a recent Osterman Research report to address their findings – and measure how Egnyte’s solution stacks up."Content shared using most FSS tools is normally not encrypted unless the user specifically chooses to do so and installs additional software to encrypt the content."Encrypted data has its own security problems, especially related to key management. How should users share keys with external organizations securely? Egnyte partners with top security vendors, such as Sophos, to provide options to encrypt content outside of Egnyte, with the security vendor taking on the hard problems of key management. There are limits to this as well since users share content with external users that are not under IT control.Unlike other similar services that pursue a walled garden approach, Egnyte powers secure sharing of content wherever it sits, which in organizations will be on enterprise file shares. Additionally, Egnyte’s optional endpoint encryption ensures that data stored within our mobile applicaitonss is always secure. And with our deep integrations with both tier-one and tier-two storage vendors as well as highly functional browser and mobile applications, we enable collaboration on content where it sits in most cases. This is supported by a global identity and permission management framework that applies the same rules across all end-points."A serious shortcoming of most FSS solutions is that they provide IT with little control over the lifecycle of data."All links created within Egnyte can be set to expire by number of clicks and time. Policies around sharing content can be enforced on the entire repository to prohibit sharing of selected content, who can invite new users to the system, etc."When content is stored in an FSS vendor's data center, accessing it for purposes of eDiscovery or a regulatory audit becomes impractical or impossible because IT must gain access to every account."This is easily addressed by Egnyte, as there is only one enterprise repository, not a collection of individual repositories."No control over the physical location of data storage"We have partnered with tier-one data center providers globally to allow customers to explicitly specify where they would like their data to be physically stored. This is essential for compliance with Safe Harbor for example."Another problem with the use of many FSS tools is that they can be used to send and share a mix of corporate and personal content because employees are in charge of their management, not IT"Unlike products that have been scaled up from personal file repositories to address enterprise needs, Egnyte has always been designed as a multi-user, optionally IT-controlled, repository. A private folder is provided for every employee out of the gate that is distinct from common documents.We agree that customers should look for a solution designed for enterprises from the get-go and not just a collection of individual accounts brought together to give the appearance of an enterprise repository.