Introducing the Egnyte Content Services Platform

Today, we are excited to be launching the Egnyte Content Services Platform, the evolution of our industry-leading content collaboration and data governance technologies, to help organizations address the issues they face and allow for effective deployment of secure content services. The Platform is a major step forward in the progression of how companies create, use, transact, and manage their critical data. It fuses the best of our file sharing and collaboration, security and governance solutions, and leverages Egnyte’s Content Intelligence Engine to give companies comprehensive management ability to secure and manage content across remote teams, enterprise apps, and any device. This move demonstrates Egnyte’s fundamental belief that content security and data governance cannot be separated from content management.

‍Unified security and content management

‍As opposed to solutions that emphasize only storage, sync, or sharing, the Egnyte Content Services Platform stands apart through an innovative approach that helps customers:

‍Reduce content sprawl: Until now, companies have been at the mercy of massive content sprawl, both in terms of sheer volume, and because data is distributed across so many different repositories. Files exist in on-premises shared drives, public clouds, and in cloud applications, and as volume increases, discovery, categorization, and protection of that data become increasingly complex. That leaves security gaps borne of over-permissioned access and threat detection tools that are blind to assets they are unaware of. It also creates a complex web of management responsibilities for IT teams.

The Egnyte Platform provides the ability for IT admins to automatically classify and manage metadata through document type identification, which allows them to turn their unstructured data to structured data. That allows for secure, automated management of content through various stages of its life cycle. Sensitive content can be automatically archived, kept for legal reasons, or deleted based on policies. And the Platform offers seamless integration with various third-party applications, and also provides open APIs for developer communities to offer their value-added capabilities. The support for various enterprise apps allows customers to securely manage and protect their content not just on Egnyte’s own cloud services, but also on other cloud repositories.

Improve productivity: COVID necessitated a fast move to remote working, and most companies now plan to shift some workers to a permanent remote work situation. It’s imperative for companies to help their employees remain productive in the midst of this change and that starts with employees’ access to their files, no matter where they are. Finding the right files can be time-consuming as people need to log-in and out of various applications. Having a single dashboard from which users can get to and work with apps that exist within enterprise applications, OneDrive, on-prem file servers, and any number of other repositories maximizes the value of content and improves workers’ productivity.

Egnyte Platform users will have the ability to manage their tasks through project folders that can be set up for automated data retention, archival, and deletion based on policies associated with the transition of project stages. Additionally, users can set metadata on files and folders, which can then be used to organize, filter, or group that data.

Protect critical content: New threat vectors and a growing set of compliance regulations surface regularly. They present security and governance challenges for companies that rely on content being broadly accessible in order for people to do their jobs. For one thing, companies have to know what’s happening to their content - who’s accessing it, how it’s being used; and they must have visibility into the content they own and manage. Without that insight, threats that come from content exfiltration, malicious insider behavior, ransomware extortion, and a host of other issues can be crushing to a company’s operations and reputation.

To support governance and security needs, the Egnyte Platform provides comprehensive content lifecycle management capabilities that include automatic policy-based retention, archiving, defensible deletion, and legal hold, with a comprehensive audit trail of these lifecycle policies. Egnyte's robust content governance, compliance, and security capabilities extend to a growing number of non-Egnyte services. They use state-of-the-art classification technology using Machine Learning (ML) to identify sensitive content and offer tools for defining complex custom policies to easily restrict or block the sharing of sensitive content. Additionally, through ML, the Platform identifies abnormal user behavior, spots data leaks, and, warns admins of malicious behavior or compromised user accounts and even protects users from various types of ransomware.

Migrating to the Egnyte Platform

‍Egnyte customers are now able to take advantage of this unified solution with a comprehensive set of automated and policy-based migration tools allowing them to migrate both data and permissions to Egnyte.  Permissions are mapped from the original system to Egnyte's permission model and to maintain data security. These tools allow customers to quickly migrate their content from various repositories to Egnyte and take advantage of the various capabilities of the Egnyte secure Platform. To learn more about the Egnyte Content Services Platform, I encourage you to sign up for a demo or even try it out for a free 15 day trial.

‍Ramin Farassat is Egnyte's Chief Strategy Officer

Photo by Dominik Vanyi on Unsplash