Tilt Creative + Production Neutralizes Compliance Threats with Egnyte

“Egnyte allows for different layers of access for different folders and subfolders. It’s much more customizable at the per-person, per-team, and per-folder level than other cloud-based file storage systems we’ve encountered.”

Nikita Moyer

Senior Project Manager • Tilt Creative + Production

Tilt, a studio producing broadcast and digital content for marketing and advertising campaigns, had firmly embedded another provider as its file management solution. But the firm’s numerous high-profile clients demand strict data security compliance, and Tilt eventually found that provider wasn’t the best fit to meet those demands.

This realization sparked a switch to Egnyte, empowering Tilt to more effectively govern content and confidential data access. Its clients couldn’t be happier

Challenge: Inflexible Permissions Cause Compliance Headaches

As part of a merger with another creative firm in 2018, a wide array of clients were introduced to Tilt’s portfolio, including high-profile companies like Audi and Walmart. At that time, Tilt was using a different provider to manage enormous amounts of data.

“That’s when the confidential nature and size of the data became a challenge,” says Dave Trownsell, Founder and President of Tilt. “Our prior solution had a waterfall permissions structure, where the access permissions settings of one folder cascade down to all its subfolders without any way to adjust them for particular users or subfolders. When analyzing our folder structures, we realized that the organization's security posture for eliminating high-impact vulnerabilities could be improved upon.”

This was not only an internal issue; Tilt’s clients needed to see if they were meeting data protection needs specific to their organization. “Some of our major clients required us to be certified in ISO-27001 and TISAX (a global standard for information security in the automotive industry). The provider at the time was not a conducive platform for this type of need,” Trownsell explains. “Security auditors would find the waterfall structure to be a point of failure for our clients.”

Trownsell was interested in switching to Egnyte. But migrating such a massive amount of data felt daunting. As Trownsell explains: “I was running reports to try to find out where files were stored and asking users to clean up their folders. From a technical standpoint, moving to a new system in such conditions was a big task.”

Fortunately, Egnyte made things much easier than he expected. Plus, he had a secret weapon on his own team.

Solution: Migrate to Egnyte and Take Control of Permissions

Nikita Moyer, Senior Project Manager at Tilt, began planning for a migration to Egnyte alongside the Tilt project management team. The plan included target dates for key milestones and communications to staff. Trownsell describes the team’s work as “remarkable,” adding that “they’re excellent employees who handled the migration masterfully.”

“Like Dave, I was concerned at first. But Egnyte is really simple and intuitive, and that made the migration smooth,” Moyer says. “With Egnyte, we get really good version control and alerts, which has made it easy to take our organizational framework even further to ensure everything is as streamlined and efficient as possible."

Once the migration was complete, Egnyte became Tilt’s primary repository for business operations information, project master files, content related to budgeting and scheduling, and creative assets. The team was able to govern access to this content at a much more granular level than the previous provider allowed.

“Previously, if a folder had a subfolder with content that we only wanted certain people to access, we had to break the folder structure and create an amended one” Moyer says. “But Egnyte allows for different layers of access for different folders and subfolders. It’s much more customizable at the per-person, per-team, and per-folder level than other cloud-based file storage systems we've encountered. That also made it more secure to share content with outside freelancers, whom we work with a lot.”

Egnyte didn’t just offer granular permissions functionality but also made it easy for Tilt to run reports on its permissions landscape. This was critical for satisfying its clients’ compliance demands. As Trownsell explains: “Auditors want to see exactly what we’re doing on permissions – we can’t just tell them. They’ll pick someone at random and ask to see a detailed report of everything that person has permission to access. Egnyte’s Secure & Govern tool makes that very easy.”

“Auditors want to see exactly what we’re doing on permissions – we can’t just tell them. They’ll pick someone at random and ask to see a detailed report of everything that person has permission to access. Egnyte’s Secure & Govern tool makes that very easy.”

Dave Trownsell

Founder / President • Tilt Creative + Production

Benefits: Better Performance, Compliance, and Client Satisfaction

Since migrating to Egnyte, Tilt has asserted far greater control over its data environment, securing its internal operations and pleasing its clients from both an operational and compliance perspective. “I love how easy it is to run permissions reports with Egnyte,” Trownsell says. “Internal and external audits are easier now with the ability to demonstrate compliance.

It’s not just clients who are pleased with the change – it’s Tilt’s employees as well. “The feedback we’ve gotten from our users is that Egnyte is faster, it’s got better bandwidth, and outages are nonexistent,” Trownsell says. Moyer adds: “They’ve also told us Egnyte is so easy to use. We have a help form for users to fill out when they have any issues, but hardly anyone has needed to use it.”

Beyond compliance, Egnyte has helped Tilt deliver better work for its clients, particularly through the platform’s user activity alerts. As Moyer explains: “Before we traffic assets to a client, we set up an internal QC shuttle to make sure everything is to spec. Egnyte’s activity alerts have helped us be able to say, "this asset has been reviewed and approved, this new one was just uploaded, and this one hasn’t been touched yet.”

Tilt’s next goal with Egnyte is to implement training sessions to increase the team’s skill level in using the platform. “Egnyte has given us an opportunity to further improve our organizational practices around how we store and manage our content,” Moyer says. “It’s such a valuable opportunity, and we want everyone on our team to be able to benefit from it.”