Summit Spotlight: The Evolution of Encryption

“Once you send an email external to your organization, that data is gone. There’s no way to recall or undo the action, as much as people like to think there is.”

As we prepare for our upcoming Egnyte Exchange Virtual Customer Summit on October 20 and 21, we’re talking to our Egnyte experts about what they’ll be sharing with Summit attendees. Recently, we spoke with Jeff Jones, Platform Security Expert at Egnyte, to get an inside look at his session Ask the Expert: Advanced Encryption.

‍Companies are reaching a point where they require tighter controls around their data than what they’re currently utilizing or have been offered. According to Jones, this rise in demand has been largely driven by shifts in regulatory guidelines, 3rd party assurance requirements extending to businesses of all sizes and their partners as well as government contract requirements, such as CMMC (the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification) released earlier this year. That, combined with an overall appetite for more fine grained controls, naturally leads to advances and enhancements in encryption in products like Egnyte.

“A lot of companies want to extend encrypted data all the way through to the recipients’ endpoint to be managed in its native application, rather than forcing them to come back to a third-party tool and manage the experience there. It just provides more flexibility while still providing assurances that the data is only being accessed by the intended user,” Jones says.

In addition to being able to send content securely, one of the biggest benefits of employing encryption all the way to a recipient’s endpoint is the ability to pull content back from a recipient, requiring validation each time the file is accessed and revoking that validation as necessary.“

Once you send an email external to your organization, that data is gone. There’s no way to recall or undo the action, as much as people like to think there is.” Jones describes a similar challenge when sharing content, where organizations can lose control the moment they share or send content, with no true visibility into what happens to the content after that. But with advanced encryption, organizations have the ability to restrict access at the end point and maintain a larger margin of control.

Jones, with more than two decades in the encryption and security world, sees the topic of advanced encryption within Egnyte as valuable to multiple types of stakeholders. While you’d expect a company’s head of compliance to lose sleep over the encryption and control of critical content, any professional who’s managing their org’s content collaboration and sharing should also pay close attention to their ability to deliver content securely all the way to the desktop level.

“It’s always been my goal to help companies find data protections solutions that can discover and identify content in order to apply the right controls. I think we’ve got a nice combination of the two here at Egnyte.”

Jeff Jones will be presenting on October 21 at the Customer Summit, with a breakout session at noon EDT. To register for the vent and check out what other sessions are on the agenda, visit exchange.egnyte.com/virtual-summit.