Taaleri and Egnyte Build a Secure and Cost-Effective Document Room

“Everything in the Document Room is intended for the outside world, so we don't have to open up our file server to people outside of the company.”

Elina Ervamaa

Compliance Manager • Taaleri

Taaleri, a financial services company specializing in clean energy with 2.7 billion Euros under management, had a clean slate. After selling off its wealth management business segment, which housed the firm’s IT infrastructure, the firm had a rare opportunity to rebuild its IT from scratch. “We were using on-premises infrastructure, and now had a chance to move to the cloud,” says Jukka Dhawan, Chief Information Officer at Taaleri.

With Egnyte’s Document Room, Taaleri built a cloud-based secure data enclave for investor due diligence and other critical use cases.

Challenge: Isolate Files Intended for External Review

When Taaleri started its IT rebuild, the team knew one thing for sure: They didn’t want to go back to on-premises infrastructure. “For a company like us, with a lot of external partners and sensitive content, on-prem had caused a lot of problems that we wanted to leave behind,” Dhawan explains. “There’s no offline sync for folks on the road, and you can’t report on personally identifiable information (PII) or General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) content in your data without using third-party platforms.”

The team implemented Egnyte to replicate their previous file server in the cloud, giving them access to strong secure and govern functionality and facilitating seamless file access for dispersed stakeholders. Still, some processes demanded more than a cloud-hosted file server alone could offer.

“When we launch new funds, our external investors review a lot of documents as part of their due diligence,” explains Elina Ervamaa, Compliance Manager at Taaleri. “In cases like these, we need a separate area, distinct from our file server, where these stakeholders can do their work. We didn’t want to invite external people into our file server, which contains lots of sensitive data meant only for internal access.”

To build these separate environments, Taaleri partnered with several providers of VDRs. But those providers created as many problems as they solved. As Dhawan explains, “Those solutions typically charge separately for every VDR you build, which for us was a lot, as we need to create a different environment for every fund, as well as for use cases like reporting. And they lacked native integration capabilities, so if we wanted to integrate with the other platforms we rely on, we had to do custom builds or hire consultants.”

Solution: Partner With Egnyte to Build the Ideal VDR

The team at Taaleri realized that if the VDR they needed wasn’t available on the market, they would have to build it themselves. And based on their positive experience with Egnyte’s file server, they decided Egnyte was the perfect partner to help them do so. They quickly began a collaboration with Egnyte that led to the development of the VDR known today as Egnyte’s highly popular Document Room.

“We spent about a year conferring with Egnyte on what the product should look like, which functionalities would be critical, and which were lower priorities,” explains Dhawan. “We worked directly with Egnyte’s Product team, as well as company leaders including the CEO.”

This close collaboration ensured that the Document Room adhered as tightly as possible to Taaleri’s priorities, which included:

• Security and access management
  The Egnyte and Taaleri teams made sure the division between the file server and the Document Room was completely clean, and that the Document Room only contained files that were intended for external users. “Everything in the Document Room is intended for the outside world, so we don’t have to open up our file server to people outside of the company,” explains Ervamaa. 
• One-way syncing
  While external stakeholders in the Document Room were unable to access the main server, there was a critical one-way channel in the other direction. “If there’s a file in the Document Room, and someone updates the original version of the file in the main server, their updates automatically sync to the Document Room,” Dhawan says. This strengthened version control and ensured every file in both environments was up-to-date.
• Pricing
  When building the pricing model, the two teams avoided tying each room to a separate purchase, which had created headaches for Taaleri in the past. As Dhawan says, “With Egnyte, once you buy the Document Room domain and accompanying storage, it doesn’t matter if you create one room or 100,000. That really sets Egnyte apart in the market.”

“Major investors often gravitate toward big-name VDR players. But we can say from firsthand experience that Egnyte's Document Room is every bit as good as those players, if not better. I'd expect it to become a go-to for investors with billions of dollars in assets.”

Jukka Dhawan

Chief Information Officer • Taaleri

Benefits: Taaleri’s Dream Document Room Becomes a Reality

With Egnyte’s new Document Room finished and implemented, Taaleri has built more organized workflows and taken major strides in security, cost efficiency, and control. “I’m always thinking about information security,” Dhawan says. “With Egnyte, I have peace of mind. We get strong access controls. We get alerts for sensitive data like PII and GDPR content. And whereas other vendors have separate endpoints for their VDR and file server, Egnyte protects its whole system from one endpoint, meaning fewer open doors and, therefore, fewer security risks.”

Across Taaleri’s numerous business segments, the verdict from the user perspective is the same: Egnyte’s Document Room is far superior to the VDRs Taaleri previously tried. “The engineers running our wind farms, in particular, absolutely love the new Document Room,” Dhawan says. “And our Bio team says it’s like other systems they’ve used before, only much better.”

The implementation of Egnyte’s Document Room is still a recent event, and some of the legacy VDRs are still in use at Taaleri. But that’s changing fast. “Egnyte’s Document Room is the only VDR that makes us confident that everything is under our control, whether it’s separating external and internal workflows, reporting on sensitive data, or minimizing costs,” Ervamaa explains. “That’s why we’re now in the process of retiring the other VDRs. We expect to be 100% transferred over to Egnyte in the next two months or so.”

In the meantime, Egnyte’s Document Room remains a living resource, with Taaleri still collaborating with Egnyte on ways to refine it. “We have ongoing feedback sessions with Egnyte’s Product team to this day,” Dhawan says. “Everyone has been great to work with and made us confident that our feature requests are heard and integrated into the roadmap.”

As development continues, Dhawan has big expectations for the Document Room: “Major investors often gravitate toward big-name VDR players,” he says. “But we can say from firsthand experience that Egnyte’s Document Room is every bit as good as those players, if not better. Once it has been on the market for a while and gained some name recognition, I’d expect it to become a go-to for investors with billions of dollars in assets.”