Wintrust Transcends Secure Sharing to Achieve True Data Governance

“Egnyte's sensitive content detection and ransomware functionality help us stay on top of anything unusual, with constant visibility into who has access to what data, where it's stored, and who put it there.”

Michael Lambert

Chief Innovation Officer • Wintrust Financial Corp.

In the financial holdings world, Wintrust Financial Corp is a model of diversification. With $64 billion in assets, the company has 16 chartered community banks as well as non-bank businesses offering an array of services including lending, wealth management, insurance finance, and beyond.

Successful content management across this vast landscape required a technology partner that could help the company build a well-rounded data governance strategy. With Egnyte as that partner, that’s exactly what Wintrust did.

Challenge: Build a Culture and Strategy Around Data Governance

The first sign that Wintrust’s technology was in need of change came from its file sharing practices. The solution the company was using for secure sharing, ShareFile, was clunky and riddled with issues.

As Michael Lambert, Chief Innovation Officer at Wintrust, puts it: “ShareFile just wasn’t intuitive. Users had trouble logging in, and there was no single sign-on. There was long downtime with every software update. We had limited visibility into what was being shared, when, and by whom. There were missing links and files, and the support services weren’t great.” These issues depressed user adoption of the solution and led to users sharing files without security protections, creating untenable risk for the company.

But addressing this issue was just one aspect of Wintrust’s larger mandate: to create a well-rounded and well-planned data governance strategy that would ensure true data ownership and responsible content management practices. This was critical given the volume of the company’s data, as well as the wide variety of stakeholders who would be sharing and managing it across Wintrust’s offices and business segments. “If we only focused on secure file sharing, we would ultimately have to replace whatever solution we went with as other needs arose,” says Lambert.

“We were facing challenges not only with secure file sharing, but also managing unstructured data generally. This included things like retention, discovery, visibility, access monitoring, and classification. Our goal was a technology and process overhaul that would incorporate all of these items.”

Michael Lambert

Chief Innovation Officer • Wintrust Financial Corp.

Solution: An Egnyte-Powered, User-Friendly Governance Strategy

Lambert’s team got to work on a plan to set policies across every key aspect of data governance – all in a way that would be accessible and understandable enough to ensure company-wide buy-in. Implementing the plan required thorough internal communication as well as replacing both ShareFile and Wintrust’s on-premises file server with Egnyte, which offered the intuitiveness, functionality, and partnership required to facilitate good governance and user adoption.

• Communication
  The success of Wintrust’s data governance strategy depended on employees having a clear understanding of why governance actually matters. Lambert understood that this should not be taken for granted. “Users don’t typically put much conscious thought into what data exists, where it exists, and who has access to it. They were shocked to see how broad Wintrust’s permissions landscape was,” Lambert says. “There’s also a pervasive assumption that all files need to be stored forever, which isn’t true. So we did a lot of work educating them about retention and the importance of drawing lines between what we need to keep and what we don’t. When we switched to Egnyte, it was a chance to show examples of files that don’t need to come with us in the migration.”
  Communicating major company-wide policy and technology changes requires trust and sensitivity, which is why Lambert’s team took care to work with trusted leaders, tailoring communication to each department. As he explains: “Different departments handle things like file sharing in different ways, so we made sure to find champions within each department, understand their needs, and channel our communication through them, instead of having IT dictate to the whole company.” 
  
• Egnyte’s role
  The functionality of Egnyte’s cloud-hosted file management system – particularly its Secure and Govern tool – facilitated every aspect of Wintrust’s data governance ambitions. “We organized data between personal and shared directories, and separated collaboration into its own space. Egnyte makes it easy to establish access permissions and data retention periods across these different environments and departments, execute on them, and make exceptions when necessary,” Lambert explains. “Its search functionality makes data discovery a breeze, so we don’t have to guess where something is stored. Its sensitive content detection and ransomware functionality help us stay on top of anything unusual. And it provides constant visibility into who has access to what data, where it’s stored, and who put it there.”

Benefits: Good Data Governance with Buy-In Across the Company

With a smart strategy, robust communication, and Egnyte in their corner, Lambert’s team has added structure to Wintrust’s unstructured data. The company has established a culture of true data ownership, exercised through Egnyte, across each department.

Critically, thanks to the policy-driven lifecycle management Egnyte has facilitated, the company’s storage requirements have hardly increased, even while its assets over the past five years have grown by $20 billion and its workforce by 2,000 employees. “We’re much better positioned to control the movement of files throughout our organization, as well as how much data we’re storing,” Lambert says. “And we’re able to do all of this with more confidence than we’ve ever had.”

One major factor enabling this level of control is Egnyte’s unusual activity monitoring and alerts. “Egnyte’s monitoring system quickly uncovers things like large file movements or deletions,” explains Lambert. “That information allows us to talk to the user, determine if the activity was unintentional or malicious, and act quickly to mitigate any impacts. This process used to take months – now it’s immediate. Egnyte’s integration with Splunk has added further efficiency, centralizing alerts from all our systems in one place. And the users are grateful to be aware and able to help in recovery, which speaks to the strong culture of data governance and ownership that we’ve created.”

The company is now finalizing cleanup of its historical and technical debt. Lambert’s team is further maturing their processes with department champions to review data over time and increase automation of data loss prevention. None of this would be possible without the ease of use and broad functionality that Egnyte provides. “Systems with issues don’t get adopted,” Lambert says. “Users avoid them. That’s the problem we faced before. We don’t face it with Egnyte.”