Foghorn Therapeutics: A Data Governance Success Story

“The Egnyte team spent significant time to understand our data flow processes and assist us in developing the appropriate policies. We scheduled dedicated sessions to understand the data, create the policies, and fine-tune as needed.”

Dan Dinu

Vice President & Head of IT • Foghorn

As a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, Foghorn Therapeutics works to develop therapeutics for people living with cancer. Foghorn manages a wealth of highly sensitive scientific and financial data. To protect these assets, Foghorn needed a comprehensive data governance strategy. Egnyte served as the linchpin of those efforts.

Challenge: Data Architecture to Protect Intellectual Property

Foghorn originally implemented Egnyte’s core collaboration platform, with features like real-time co-editing and version control empowering dispersed stakeholders to work on the same document simultaneously. However, as more drug compounds started moving from pre-clinical testing into Phase I trials – and the company started producing more data – governance became the team’s top priority. The Foghorn team needed to build a secure and well-controlled clinical data repository to protect their intellectual property, including clinical, research, and financial data pertaining to Foghorn’s molecules and chemical structures.

Solution: Egnyte Provides Broad Visibility and Control

Foghorn’s goals for Egnyte’s Secure & Govern features were twofold: first, to build a clinical data repository that provided full visibility into the location of sensitive content; and second, to secure that content with appropriate access permissions.

Leveraging Egnyte’s standard governance policies offered a substantial level of protection for Foghorn’s financial and scientific data. Additionally, the team created custom policies in order to identify any content containing specific keywords and note the exact storage location of that content. All of this information is made available in an intuitive dashboard within the Secure & Govern tool. The team can decide if any remediation actions or retention policies are necessary based on the type and location of a given file.

Egnyte’s Customer Success and Services teams were helpful partners in establishing Foghorn’s new security model. Dan Dinu, vice president and head of IT, explains: “The Egnyte team spent significant time to understanding our data flow processes and assisting us in developing the appropriate policies. We scheduled dedicated sessions to understand the data, create the policies, and fine-tune as needed.”

The second step involved leveraging Egnyte’s permissions functionality to ensure data was only accessible to appropriate stakeholders. For this, Foghorn leverages Egnyte’s highly intuitive permission governance which includes permission control, permission browsers and robust reporting. According to Dinu:

“Managing and auditing permissions in Egnyte is much simpler compared to achieving the same results in the Microsoft environment. This is why Egnyte is our preferred choice for shared data storage.”

Dan Dinu

Vice President & Head of IT • Foghorn

Benefits: Secure Data and Fully Informed Decision-Making

Building a secure data governance environment in Egnyte allows Foghorn to ensure that nothing is overlooked. The team always has visibility into the location of sensitive financial and scientific data so that they can swiftly apply necessary restrictions on how that content is shared and accessed.

So far, the team has created eight custom Secure & Govern policies in Egnyte to ensure this visibility is as thorough as possible. Some of these policies include scanning for specific file types (e.g., ChemDraw, SMILES files) or certain keywords (e.g., lead compounds).

Foghorn continues to partner with Egnyte and expand its adoption to support its growing research and clinical activities.

Dinu is pleased with the decision to move forward with Egnyte. “We evaluated solutions from Box and Microsoft but found Egnyte to best meet our requirements. Our lean IT team can easily manage, monitor, and scale Egnyte as needed.”