MullenLowe Selects Egnyte to Securely Share Design Files With External Clients

MullenLowe is a marketing and communications firm with offices around the world, including headquarters in London and Boston. Its creative teams work with some of the biggest brands in retail, life sciences and entertainment. The firm relies on Egnyte to support file sharing across its footprint of small international offices, its 1,200 person Boston HQ, and clients around the world.

Challenge

MullenLowe’s creative teams share, edit and produce large numbers of design files with a range of clients. To protect confidentiality and client IP, those documents must remain in the hands of only those who are authorized to work on them.

In a search for an enterprise-wide file solution, the IT team looked at a wide range of options, including Box and Dropbox. Box and Dropbox were deselected due to the lack of standard data protection and controls offered with those consumer-based solutions. They considered Google Drive, and while its security features were solid, they were too cumbersome for the small team to manage. According to Mark Lewis, Global Infrastructure & Security Director at MullenLowe: "As an IT organisation, we don't have visibility into what's stored on the Google Drives of our users, which makes it difficult to perform data audits. This, along with a lack of granular sharing controls, makes Google the wild west from a security point of view."

SharePoint, meanwhile, was too complex and required a team of .Net developers to manage and maintain. More importantly, it was deemed too easy to share public links to files and folders, which potentially would expose client’s data - a risk not worth taking.

Solution

MulllenLowe selected Egnyte to serve as its single source of content truth for the company’s designers. The rollout started in international offices and quickly spread to its Boston headquarters. In its London headquarters, MullenLowe moved 90 TB of data to Egnyte rather than purchase a new storage area network (SAN). For larger creative work, the firm uses Egnyte’s Smart Cache to overcome potential in-office latency issues.

For the central IT department, Egnyte expands their visibility into file usage with refined auditing on anomalous activity, permissions, and access across sites and users.

Since its rollout across the company, Egnyte has greatly improved the design team’s ability to access and share content, while providing IT with centralized control over external document sharing.

Benefits

Today, Egnyte serves as the single source of truth for most of the company’s users, enabling better auditing, automated reporting, and centralized visibility for IT. Users also leverage the enhanced co-editing features for desktop clients working in Microsoft 365, which helps to further improve team collaboration.

MullenLowe plans to use Egnyte's deep understanding of file usage across teams to further parse and analyze the data for reports on anomalous activity, permissions, and access across sites and users. That data will be used to analyze and understand file relationships, such as how many people in the Boston office have external file shares.

IT conducts biannual reviews of the platform to validate its suitability and security capabilities. They keep coming back to Egnyte because of its centralized control and how it supports auditing. Moreover, it saves his limited staff time and money, especially compared to alternatives that require a team of administrators to manage.