Wealth Management Firm Asserts Strong Oversight of Clients’ Financial Data

Managing large volumes of highly sensitive client data is common for financial services firms. The question of who has access to that data matters tremendously–but provisioning access across a team of in-house employees, dozens of independent contractors, and a support vendor is a recipe for serious IT headaches if not managed correctly.

After swapping out Microsoft SharePoint for Egnyte, a US-based wealth management firm now has intuitive and robust security and governance functionality at their fingertips, empowering them to simplify their access management and scale securely.

Challenge: Legacy Technology Makes a Mess of Access Permissions

The primary responsibility of any financial services firm’s IT team boils down to one thing: Responsible stewardship of client data. “When onboarding clients, we gather information including insurance policies, driver’s license numbers, house deeds, and personal financial data,” the firm’s IT Manager says. “With so many stakeholders working with such sensitive data, including external folks like contractors and vendors, you need to be really careful.”

The firm has always been a Microsoft shop, with products like SharePoint and OneDrive particularly prominent in their workflows. Unfortunately, these products were far from capable of providing what they needed: granular provisioning of data access, with clear visibility into who has access to which files, and when. Stakeholders would share folders and links to documents with hardly any oversight, leading to a thicket of intertwining permissions that was excruciating to govern. If someone needed temporary access to a file, IT had to note when the person’s access was set to expire and, at that moment, manually find the document and revoke access.

“There was so little in the way of controls and governance,” the IT Manager explains, illustrating the point with an anecdote: “We had someone on our team who wanted to restrict access to a sensitive file. When he did, it automatically applied that restriction to a whole host of other folders and files that didn’t need it, because SharePoint lacked the ability to provision access at a granular level. It took us almost a month to recover from that.”

Cybersecurity was also a major concern to the IT Manager: “Microsoft accounts are really vulnerable. We just weren’t confident that our data was safe from nefarious outside attempts to access it.”

Solution: Take Control of Access Governance with Egnyte

The firm is responsible for providing SEC-compliant technology stacks to the smaller financial advisory firms they work with. They were already using Egnyte’s data protection and credential management functionality to clear that compliance bar. Now, they turned to Egnyte to shore up their data stewardship not just for outside advisors, but across the enterprise.

For the IT Manager, this move initially came as a surprise. “Microsoft is known as the IT leader, and I wasn’t sure how Egnyte would compete,” he said. “But once I saw Egnyte in action, its capabilities, and how easy it was to operate, the choice was clear.” 

Several of Egnyte’s capabilities stood out in particular:

• Permissions management 
  Egnyte enabled IT to automate the time-based revocation of file access by setting expiration dates on links to key files. The team could also provide access through groups rather than allowing individuals to change file permissions on a whim. “If someone needs access to a certain file, I can just add them to the right group and they can have what they need,” the IT Manager explains. “And we can run reports to get a full picture of access history.” 
• Linking Egnyte and Practifi via Salesforce integration
  During onboarding, the firm sends new clients a secure link through which they can upload all their onboarding data into Egnyte. Thanks to Egnyte’s Salesforce integration, the advisor bringing on the client can automatically access that data in Practifi, a Salesforce OEM partner the firm has implemented. This eliminates the separate effort of setting up the proper permissions for the rep to access the data directly through Egnyte. As the IT Manager says: “One advisor may have hundreds of clients. That adds up to lots of overhead that the integration eliminates.” The team also uses onboarding links when bringing on new advisory firms.
•  Automated security alerts
  The firm has chosen to keep some data on OneDrive. Fortunately, Egnyte is able to monitor not only their OneDrive repository, but also Exchange emails, and send alerts for suspicious attempts to access it–an invaluable feature given the vulnerability of their Microsoft accounts. “We got alerts from Egnyte about hacking attempts that neither Microsoft nor our third-party vendor detected,” says the IT Manager. “That visibility is critical for us.”

Benefits: A Path to Continued Growth, Free of IT Obstacles

Since expanding their use of Egnyte, the company has assumed full control over the security and governance of their data. They’ve eliminated time-consuming auditing and troubleshooting work related to access permissions. And they’ve paved the way for accelerated company growth.

The IT Manager is happy with the results. “Egnyte’s Secure and Govern capabilities have been huge. We now have so much more control over the provisioning of data access. And if we ever have a question about access to a certain folder, we can just run a quick report and see exactly who has access to what.”

On the security side, the alerts about nefarious access attempts have prompted the team to build additional barriers around their environments, taking their security posture to new heights. The IT Manager describes how exceptional Egnyte has been in this area: “Egnyte gives me a dashboard where I can see exactly when login attempts have occurred and where they originated from – Russia, 6:00 AM yesterday, et cetera. It’s so informative that our third-party support vendor has been asking me to show them data on account login attempts, rather than the other way around.”

Throughout the IT Manager’s experience, Egnyte has been by his side for whatever data governance and security needs may arise. “With Microsoft, we could wait weeks for a response on a support ticket. With Egnyte, it comes within 48 hours. And the Professional Services folks were so helpful in getting us set up. Our staff had such a smooth experience transitioning from the old system. I’ve seen other new technology implementations cause a lot of frustration, but not Egnyte.”

The firm is now looking to expand their use of Egnyte to include other features like automated workflows, Copilot, and external backups to AWS S3. In the meantime, with access permissions and security under control, their main focus is on building upon their growth momentum. As the IT Manager puts it: “We’ve doubled in size, and as we add more clients and advisors, Egnyte keeps the wind at our back.”